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| Big Comrade is watching you... (Image courtesy thetimes.co.uk.) |
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| In grand internet tradition, a cat meme seemed the best way to celebrate. (Image courtesy funnyjunk.com.) |
| This isn't cool and never will be, regardless of what the Department of "Justice" thinks. (Image courtesy watchdog.org.) |
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| There's a lot of skullduggery out there...removing the evidence is kind of a big job. (Image courtesy betanews.com.) |
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| Unsurprisingly, people said and did a bunch of dumb stuff caught on Twitter too. (Image courtesy transparency.twitter.com.) |
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| So that's how that works! Thanks, transparency! (Image courtesy watchdog.org.) |
So, you know all that talk about things like Aaron's Law and how Congress needs to fix the CFAA? Apparently, the House Judiciary Committee has decided to raise a giant middle finger to folks who are concerned about abuses of the CFAA. Over the weekend, they began circulating a "draft" of a "cyber-security" bill that is so bad that it almost feels like the Judiciary Committee is doing it on purpose as a dig at online activists who have fought back against things like SOPA, CISPA and the CFAA. Rather than fix the CFAA, it expands it. Rather than rein in the worst parts of the bill, it makes them worse. And, from what we've heard, the goal is to try to push this through quickly, with a big effort underway for a "cyberweek" in the middle of April that will force through a bunch of related bills. You can see the draft of the bill here . . .
Ever since the failure of SOPA, MPAA boss Chris Dodd has been making the rounds, giving the same damn stump speech over and over again. We've reported on it before, but he's done it again, this time at the National Press Club. As the transcript shows, it's the same old story . . .
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he plans to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) with Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) this year . . .
CISPA aimed to thwart cyberattacks by making it easier for private companies to share information about cyberthreats and malicious source code with the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security. The bill enjoyed support from a broad swath of companies, including Facebook and AT&T, because they said legal hurdles slowed down information sharing about cyber threats between industry and government.
Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates launched online protests against the bill because they argued that it lacked sufficient privacy protections and would increase the pool of people's electronic communications flowing to the intelligence community and the secretive National Security Agency (NSA).
“Overcriminalization” describes the trend in America – and particularly in Congress – to use the criminal law to “solve” every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use of civil penalties), and coerce Americans into conforming their behavior to satisfy social engineering objectives. Criminal law is supposed to be used to redress only that conduct which society thinks deserving of the greatest punishment and moral sanction.Sound far fetched? Consider the case of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. From Tech News Daily:
But as a result of rampant overcriminalization, trivial conduct is now often punished as a crime. Many criminal laws make it possible for the government to convict a person even if he acted without criminal intent (i.e., mens rea). Sentences have skyrocketed, particularly at the federal level.
The CFAA is a 1986 law, section 1030 of the federal criminal code, which makes any unauthorized access into a protected network or computer a federal crime and permits harsh penalties for those convicted.
But 1986 was a long time ago. Today, any Web server can be defined as a protected computer, and almost anything can be defined as unauthorized access. Use your roommate's Netflix account to watch movies on your iPad? You're violating the CFAA. Trim the URLs of articles on the New York Times website so you can read them for free? You're breaking federal law. Check your Facebook page at work, even if your employer forbids it? Better call your lawyer. . . .
To Robert Graham, chief executive officer of Errata Security in Atlanta, the CFAA is "hopelessly out of date, and can be used to prosecute anybody for almost anything."
"The issue is 'authorization,'" Graham said. "Back in 1986, everyone had to be explicitly authorized to use a computer with an assigned username and password.Of course, these laws only apply to the people and are rarely if ever used to prosecute ruling elites. The US Congress, for instance, is a hot bed of cyber criminality. From the Guardian:
"But today, with the Web, we access computers with reckless abandon without knowing whether we are authorized or not," he added. "When you click on a URL, you are technically in violation of the law as it was designed."
Employees of the US Congress were found to be downloading a host of television shows and movies illegally on congressional computers, according to a report by anti-piracy service ScanEye.It is time to put these criminals in prison and throw away the key.
The report shared by US News and World Reports showed that since early October, congressional employees have downloaded movies and television shows including The Walking Dead, The Dark Knight Rises and 30 Rock.
The report demonstrates that even though Congress has found itself at the forefront of measures to stop piracy, including the much-maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), its staff do not always follow the legislators' lead. . . .
The blog TorrentFreak has found that IP addresses associated with the biggest players in the anti-piracy legislative campaign are used for illegal downloading. People at Hollywood studios, major record labels and the US department of homeland security have downloaded music, film and television on their employers' networks.
As TorrentFreak noted in a 2011 blogpost, Congress was illegally downloading television shows and self-help books around the same time some members were drafting Sopa.
VC: The Internet is threatened by governments that want to control content and use of the network. All of us have gotten accustomed to freedom of expression and freedom of access to content on the net, but we have also gotten accustomed to something called permissionless innovation, which is a phrase I use to explain why it’s so important to keep the network relatively open and freely accessible. It’s so that anyone who wants to try a new application out can just do so.
We all have to appreciate that there are harms that occur on the net, no one who tells you otherwise should be believed, there’s viruses, worms, trojan horses and other kinds of technical attacks on the net turning your machine into a member of a botnet that generates spam or generates denial of service attacks or directly goes after content on your machine, there’s key loggers that go looking for passwords and account numbers. Those are bad.
The problem is that sometimes the proposed cure is worse than the disease, and in some cases it is to shut down the Internet or block websites or to interfere with our ability to make use of the system, and these harms and their remedies are used as an excuse to prevent political speech, to prevent people from sharing information from knowing what is going on, it’s to obscure transparent visibility of what the government is doing. Governments that are authoritarian are feeling threatened by the freedom and openness of expression and discovery of information on the Internet so they will use any excuse they can find to shut that network down. That’s what you’re seeing right now.
The FBI is renewing its request for new Internet surveillance laws, saying technological advances hinder surveillance and warning that companies should be required to build in back doors for police.
"We must ensure that our ability to obtain communications pursuant to court order is not eroded," FBI director Robert Mueller told a U.S. Senate committee this week. Currently, he said, many communications providers "are not required to build or maintain intercept capabilities."
Mueller's prepared remarks reignite a long-simmering debate pitting the values of privacy, limited government, and freedom to innovate against law enforcement requests that often find a receptive audience on Capitol Hill. Two days ago, for instance, senators delayed voting on a privacy bill that would require search warrants for e-mail after sheriffs and district attorneys objected.
In May, CNET disclosed that the FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a proposed law that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in back doors for government surveillance. The bureau's draft proposal would require that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.
That’s according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes “purely political surveillance on foreigners' data” if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
Europeans were previously alarmed by the fact that the PATRIOT Act could be used to obtain data on citizens outside the United States. But this time the focus is a different law—the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Amendments Act—which poses a “much graver risk to EU data sovereignty than other laws hitherto considered by EU policy-makers,” according to the recently published report, Fighting Cyber Crime and Protecting Privacy in the Cloud, produced by the Centre for the Study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security.
The FISA Amendments Act was introduced in 2008, retroactively legalizing a controversial “warrantless wiretapping” program initiated following 9/11 by the Bush administration. Late last month, it was renewed through 2017. During that process, there was heated debate over how it may violate Americans’ privacy. But citizens in foreign jurisdictions have even greater cause for concern, says the report’s co-author, Caspar Bowden, who was formerly chief privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe.
According to Bowden, the 2008 FISA amendment created a power of “mass surveillance” specifically targeted at the data of non-U.S. persons located outside America, which applies to cloud computing . . .
The folks over at the CATO Institute have put together a short five minute video onthe rush by the federal government to renew the FISA Amendments Act, with no changes, which effectively has sanctioned warrantless wiretapping on millions of Americans. Even though the plain language of the bill suggests it only should be used on foreigners, it's become clear that thanks to weasel language in the bill, and a "secret" interpretation by a secret court, the definition of "targeting" foreigners has been interpreted to mean any communication that might possibly somehow shed light on some sort of illegal activity that might possibly maybe involve foreigners sometimes in some manner. As such, it seems likely that the NSA, in particular, has used this bill and its secret interpretation to sweep up huge databases of information about Americans, even as most people (including many in Congress) believe the bill only is used to spy on foreigners.
Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation into law Friday that would prohibit employers from their asking workers for logins to their social media and internet accounts.
The bill, introduced by state Rep. Aric Nesbitt, R-Lawton, bars companies and schools from asking employees and students for their usernames and passwords.
“Cyber security is important to the reinvention of Michigan, and protecting the private internet accounts of residents is a part of that,” Snyder said in a press release. “Potential employees and students should be judged on their skills and abilities, not private online activity.”
The Senate is about to vote on an extension of the controversial FISA Amendments Act—the unconstitutional law that allows the NSA to warrantless spy on Americans speaking to people abroad. Yet you wouldn't know it by watching CSPAN because the Senate isn't debating it.
When Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, despite deep privacy concerns by Americans across the political spectrum, they included an expiration date of December 31, 2012 to ensure that the law would get a thorough review. Yet Senate leaders have so far refused to schedule any time on the Senate floor for debate or consideration of vital privacy-protecting amendments. Worse, they won't even tell the American public when they're going to vote on it. It's possible they may vote on this bill—with no privacy protective changes—without any debate at all, and we won't know until it is happening.
Contact your Senators today to tell them how important this is.
The FISA Amendments Act continues to be controversial; key portions of it were challenged in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this term. In brief, the law allows the government to get secret FISA court orders—orders that do not require probable cause like regular warrants—for any emails or phone calls going to and from overseas.
Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.
Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency.
The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.
