SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and internet censorship laws.

[Peter Lemkin]

[/url][url=http://<br />Find more videos like this on Occupii]

[Magda Hassan]

AUCKLAND, New Zealand Facing extraditon and possibly decades in U..S. prison, Megaupload founder and filesharing kingpin Kim Dotcom is fighting back, internet-style, launching kim.com, in an attempt to foment a protest movement on his behalf.Dotcom, currently on bail in New Zealand, argues the "the U.S. government has declared war on the internet" and is trying to convince the netroots community to vote against President Obama on Nov. 5 if the case isn't dropped.Cleverly, Dotcom includes the slogan "SOPA PIPA ACTA MEGA," trying to make the argument that the case against his site was motivated by the same forces that unsuccessfully tried to pass stringent copyright agreements in the United States and internationally earlier this year, until they were defeated by a groundswell of protest.But he's not stopping with just a website. Dotcom also recorded a song and accompanying video called "Mr President," which is addressed to Obama, asking "Whatever happened to change, Mr. President?" As of publication, the video has over 475,000 views on YouTube.Dotcom told Wired that he set up the site to "inform about the unreasonable actions and phony charges against Megaupload and its management.""It is important for people understand how dangerous the Megaupload case is," he said, adding that there "is no due process or rule of law, just politically driven aggression and destruction lobbied for by the MPAA."According to Dotcom, the FBI picked his business as "an easy target" with the goal being the total destruction of it without a trial."Megaupload was a good corporate citizen and we have always cooperated with rights holders and authorities," Dotcom said. The indictment charges that Megaupload was dedicated to copyright infringement and that the founders knew this and encouraged it in order to increase subscriptions and ad revenue.But Dotcom says the United States' case is weak."They had good reason to seize every penny and to try and keep me locked up. They can't win this case simply because there was never any criminality," Dotcom said.Dotcom earned a small fortune from Megaupload; he lived in a mansion in New Zealand, paid for a fireworks show in Auckland and had a collection of sports cars that were seized in a January raid on his house. Now all of his assets have been seized, but he says that he is not soliciting donations to pay for the court case. At least, not yet."We are still working on unfreezing our own assets in order to pay for our defense. Asking for donations will be our last resort," Dotcom says."The reaction to the site has been overwhelmingly positive," Dotcom said. "The support we are getting is very important to us. "The number of people following the developments of this case is growing daily. Everyone can see that something is terribly wrong here. It's easy to fight back when you have so much support and know that you have done nothing wrong. And I would say my confidence is a reflection of the confidence in our legal team. They are looking forward to this battle."Asked if the "© 2012 All Rights Reserved" notice on the site and the site's terms of service agreements sections on rights and copyrights could be seen as ironic considering the case against Megaupload, Dotcom replied:"Lawyers."

Starting Aug. 1, Dotcom will start a campaign trying to rally 200 million former Megaupload users using their e-mail addresses, according to the site.Meanwhile, the extradition process for Dotcom and his Megaupload co-defendants Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk drags on.District Court Judge Nevin Dawson has been selected to replace Justice David Harvey, after the latter recused himself from the case following a public remark that could be construed as revealing bias against the United States.The Megaupload Four face up to 20 years in prison and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages if convicted.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07...Stories%29

[Magda Hassan]

Government: we can freeze Mega assets even if case is dismissed

Judge is weighing argument that Megaupload is beyond reach of US criminal law.

by Timothy B. Lee - July 28 2012, 3:54am AUSEST

• GOVERNMENT
  
• INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
  

147

The United States government said today that even if the indictment of the Megaupload corporation is dismissed, it can continue its indefinite freeze on the corporation's assets while it awaits the extradition of founder Kim Dotcom and his associates.
Judge Liam O'Grady is weighing a request to dismiss the indictment against Megaupload because (in Megaupload's view) the federal rules of criminal procedure provide no way to serve notice on corporations with no US address. At a hearing in Alexandria, VA, he grilled both attorneys in the case but did not issue a ruling.
O'Grady speculated, with evident sarcasm, that Congress intended to allow foreign corporations like Megaupload to "be able to violate our laws indiscriminately from an island in the South Pacific."
But Megaupload's attorney insisted that this may not be too far from the truth. Megaupload, they said, is a Hong Kong corporation with no presence in the United States. He argued it was perfectly reasonable for Megaupload to be subject to the criminal laws of Hong Kong, but not the United States.

"It's never had a US address"

For its part, the government suggested that it could sidestep the mailing requirement in one of several ways. For example, it could wait for Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the United States and then mail notice to him, as Megaupload's representative, at his address in prison. Or, they suggested, the government could send notice of the indictment to Carpathia Hosting, a Virginia company that has leased hundreds of servers to the locker site.
The government also mentioned the possibility that it could use the provisions of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to send notice to Megaupload's Hong Kong address.
But Judge O'Grady seemed skeptical of these argument. He noted that the "plain language" of the law required sending notice to the company's address in the United States. "You don't have a location in the United States to mail it to," he said. "It's never had an address" in the United States.
And Megaupload pointed out that the government hadn't produced a single example in which the government had satisfied the rules of criminal procedure using one of the methods it was suggesting in this case. Most of the precedents the government has produced were in civil cases, which have different rules. And most involved serving a corporate parent via its subsidiary. That's a very different relationship than, for example, the vendor-customer relationship between Megaupload and Carpathia.
The government brought up one new example during the hearing: an instance in which a judge allowed notice to be sent via e-mail to the Columbian guerilla group FARC. But Megaupload's attorneys dismissed this example as well, pointing out that FARC was not a corporation and that the propriety of that service was never tested in court.
The government also argued that it could keep Megaupload in legal limbo indefinitely. "None of the cases impose a time limit on service," the government's attorney told the judge. Therefore, the government believes it can leave the indictment hanging over the company's head, and keep its assets frozen, indefinitely.
Not only that, but the government believes it can continue to freeze Megaupload's assets and paralyze its operations even if the judge grants the motion to dismiss. That's because in the government's view, the assets are the proceeds of criminal activity and the prosecution against founder Kim Dotcom will still be pending. The fact that the assets are in the name of Megaupload rather than its founder is of no consequence, the government claimed.
Hollywood, at least, seems nervous that Judge O'Grady might buy Megaupload's argument. In a conference call held Wednesday in advance of today's hearing, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America argued that the dismissal of the case against Megaupload would have little practical impact, since the company's principals would still be facing indictment. And he rejected Kim Dotcom's efforts to frame the case as a test of Internet freedom, describing Dotcom as a "career criminal" who had grown wealthy stealing the work of others.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/...dismissed/

[Peter Lemkin]

Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Hold Telecom Companies Accountable for Domestic Spying


The Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to a 2008 law granting immunity to telecom companies that aided the George W. Bush administration's warrantless domestic spy program. Groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union had brought the case, consolidating 33 different lawsuits against the companies after a lower court ruled that the firms are protected by congressionally mandated retroactive immunity. An appeals court upheld the case's dismissal last year, and on Tuesday the Supreme Court declined to hear it without comment. The ruling could mark the end of legal attempts to hold the telecom firms accountable for the spying. In a statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: "After 11 years and multiple congressional reports, public admissions and media coverage, the only place that this program hasn't been seriously considered is in the courts."

[Magda Hassan]

MEGA MEGAUPLOAD KIM DOTCOM PRIVACY
JAN 18, 2013 2:59 PM








Hands On With Kim Dotcom's New Mega: This Service Could Dismantle Copyright Forever

Mario Aguilar

Kim Dotcom's Mega officially launches tomorrow, but we're already in. From the membership plans we showed you this morning, the service might look like it's just another online storage locker like Dropbox or Google Drive. But it's way more than that. Mega is a weapon aimed straight at copyright rights holders. It's maybe the most private, invincible file-sharing service of all time.
When you first sign in, you see (instead of a big red button coyly promising to change the world) a simple drag-and-drop upload tool. A Mega upload tool.

From there, you're immediately prompted to agree to terms and conditions. Our resident lawyertold us they're not very well written, but in essence, they absolve Mega for any liability whatsoever for and naughty things you might do with the service. Smart Move, Kim.

After agreeing, you arrive at your Cloud Drivethe file manager where all of your everything lives. When you select one of your files or folders to upload you realize how fast this thing is. I went ahead and uploaded Metallica's Kill Em All in just a few minutes.
From there, with a single right-click, I can generate a download link for the album. And then I can send it to whoever I want. It's Megaupload with a file manager.

So what's to stop Mega from going down just the way Megaupload did? Mega's privacy, which is a no-foolin' stroke of genius. See, all of your files are encrypted locally before they're uploaded, so Mega has no idea what anything is. It could be family photos or work documents, or an entire discography of your favorite band. Poof: online and easy to share. And importantly, Mega doesn't have the decryption key necessary to get in. See? It's a masterstroke of copyright subversion.

To explain further, Mega's terms say that nobody can access your stuff without your personal decryption key. And they don't have it. Only you do. The company does, however, stipulate in the privacy policy that they might cooperate with law enforcement. But big deal; what are they going to turn over? When Twitter and Facebook cooperate with the authorities, they have access to your data. All Mega has is an encrypted file.

So why is this a copyright killer? Well, actually, it's way way more than a copyright killer; it enables the most private data exchanges of any online service available to the public. Prying eyes will have a hard time getting to them.
That's important because the private exchange of your data has always been a huge problem with online services. Take Google for example: Big G sometimes complies with requests to hand over your datathe data you thought was private. Google does it because it can be compelled to do so, and because it has access. Conversely, if authorities wanted to compel Kim Dotcom and company to hand over your data, they wouldn't be able to do it. And getting other information out of Megalike the technical details about how its keys workis legally problematic, to say the least.

So now two very big questions remain, and we can't answer them from simply demoing the site. The first, is how secure is Mega? Can hackers break in? Can the FBI?
The second question, is what are Kim Dotcom's future plans for this service? He's provided a vague roadmap for what lies ahead, but we can't be sure. We're looking forward to hearing what Kim Dotcom has to say at the launch press conference at 2:30AM EST Sunday morning. We'll be there, red-eyed and struggling to write coherently.
http://gizmodo.com/5977163/hands-on-with...ht-forever

[Peter Lemkin]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A federal appeals court has ruled the government can continue to keep secret its efforts to pursue the private information of Internet users without a warrant as part of its probe into the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The case involved three people connected to WikiLeaks whose Twitter and email records were sought by the government, including computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir .

AMY GOODMAN: The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the account holders, argued that the subpoena violated their privacy rights, and they should know why the government wanted their information. However, late last month, the court rejected a request to unseal all orders relating to the three individuals that may have been sent to companies other than Twitter.

For more, we're joined by Jacob Appelbaum himself. He's a developer and advocate for the Tor Project system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet.

Jacob Appelbaum, welcome to Democracy Now! I'm glad we didn't have to subpoena you to get you here.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, I imagine I would have to know about it in order to show up, so...

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about this federal court ruling that came down two Fridays ago.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Essentially, wewe lost, actually, quite some time ago about the data being revealed to the U.S. governmentthat is, metadata. And the government essentially argues that metadata is not the same as content, therefore they can issue an administrative subpoena, a so-called 2703(d) order, and this administrative subpoena has a much lower bar than, let's say, a search warrant. And it can also have a gag. In fact, most of them seem to have a gag. Twitter was able to unseal this so that we could begin to fight it. We lost. And it's quite sad. They received the data. But we appealed again about secrecy of docketing. That is to say that we believe that courts should have to keep accurate records of this type of an order and other orders like it. And we were hoping that we would be able to learn that there were other companies out there and that we would be able to challenge this fishing expedition.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to you. Why did they get your account, all your information in Twitter?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, I mean, many people from the government have said, during detainments and other times in which they have confronted me, that I should understand why this is happening. But the reality is that I don't understand why it's happening, in a legal senseat least until now. Now the government argues that I should understand that this is the case, and it's this case because it's as secret as a grand jury proceeding. And there is, in fact, a WikiLeaks grand jury, where they have been pressuring people. In some cases, people have been threatened with, effectively, indefinite detention, if they don't comply, that, you know, they let people know there's really not

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to comply?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, if they ask them a question, they'll either forcibly immunize them or they willmaybe they'll, you know, threaten them with just detaining them without really explaining what will happen. There's a lot of pressure coming from a lot of different angles. So, what the government is effectively saying with this ruling is that they want to have not just secret laws and secret interpretations, but no accountability. And this is something which I think is pretty scary, and I think we should have public laws, public interpretations and public accountability. And this iswhat we see is more of the same. I mean, we see this with the targeted assassination, the indefinite detention in NDAA. And this is just the Internet version of that, where they've decided they don't even have to get a search warrant, and I have no right to resist it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So what do you thinkwhat are the implications of this ruling for government surveillance, and what the limits are on government surveillance, if any?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, I think in the United States the gloves are off. And when I was here with Bill Binney last, I think he pretty much explained that this is the case.

AMY GOODMAN: The former NSA, National Security Agency

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yeah, I mean, the secret interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act seems to be that anything that the government wants is fair game without a warrant. And that's terrifying. And this seems to be the tip of the iceberg. You know, as we know from that video with the FBI woman that I met, she seemed to indicate that there was a national security letter. So I think these 2703(d) orders, they're important to be considered as the tip of an iceberg of an investigation, so there are probably other types of legal orders. And so, I think it's important to stress: Metadata in aggregate is content.

AMY GOODMAN: If people are having trouble understanding you, metadata in aggregate is content.

JACOB APPELBAUM: It'syeah, absolutely. What that means is that if you look at one event, that I talk to you via email, in theory, that we talked is a piece of metadata. The contentthat is, what I wrote in the emailthat is, in theory, protected, and you need a search warrant for it. But if they know that I talk to you every single morning, that tells a story, maybe even, you know, a really important story. And maybe if they see that I talk to Dan or they see that I talk to other people, that also tells a story that is equal to content when it's viewed in an aggregate. And that's something that's quite terrifying, because the court doesn't seem to recognize that, nor do they recognize the location privacy issues with the Internet. And that is to say, they watch and see every place that I've been. They get this data, and then they have a tracking device, effectively. Now, in my case, I use the Tor network in order to protect my location anonymity needs, but most people don't, and they expect the rule of law to do that for them. So imagine their surprise when it doesn't.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was awarded the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in absentia this weekend. Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, fighting extradition to Sweden. In a ceremony at the Museum of Modern Art, artist and activist Yoko Ono paid tribute to Assange.

YOKO ONO: This 2013 Courage Award for the Arts is presented to Julian Assange. With your courage, the truth was revealed to usthank youand gave us wisdom and power to heal the world. On behalf of the suffering world, I thank you. Yoko Ono Lennon. Thank you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Yoko Ono giving an award to Julian Assange in absentia. Jacob Appelbaum, could you comment

AMY GOODMAN: You were there.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: on Assange's case? You were there.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yeah, I think Julian Assange is ahe's a hero. And, you know, he's a personal friend of mine, and I think that people should support him. And I believe that that award from Yoko Ono is quite an honor, and I'm really happy to see so many people supporting Julian. And I hope that the British government will grant him safe passage to Ecuador, as he is effectively a political prisoner in Her Majesty's surveillance state.

AMY GOODMAN: A lawsuit challenging a controversial statute that gives the government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens is back in federal court this week. On Wednesday, a group of academics, journalists, and activists will present oral arguments in court against a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a landmark ruling last September, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. The judge rejected the Obama administration's argument that the NDAA merely reaffirmed an existing law recognizing the military's right to perform certain routine duties. However, President Obama quickly appealed Judge Forrest's ruling and sought an emergency stay on the injunction.

Well, for more, we're joined now by Daniel Ellsberg, one of the plantiffs in the NDAA lawsuit who will be attending Wednesday's hearings. He's perhaps the country's most famous whistleblower, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to Democracy Now!

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, can you talk about this case?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes. Well, as an American citizen, I'm really almost whipsawed by emotions this morning. On the one hand, I'm here to attend the court hearing at the circuit court on Wednesday at the Federal Court Building, where I expect to see the Obama administration color itself with shame in arguing that an American citizen can be detained indefinitely in military custody without charges, indefinitely, violating really the core principles of law that go back to the Magna Carta. On the other hand, I was up late last night reading the 112-page document of Katherine B. Forrest, and I have to say, at the end of that

AMY GOODMAN: The judge.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The judgment, again, granting an injunction, saying that these provisions of the law that will be argued and defended byshamefully, by the Obama administration and by three U.S. senators, who will be claiming that the detention is constitutional and legalher argument was that it was facially unconstitutional. And when I read her detailed argument, 112, taking each point of the prosecution over a period now of nearly a yeartheir evidence, their lack of evidence, their argumenttaking each argument that this was constitutional and smashing it on this, I felt pride as an American. I thought, this is the American citizen that I fought for as a marine. This is a constitutional order, a rule of law, a judge, appointed by Obama, who's willing to say that her boss was mistaken in claiming that this rule is compatible with our rule of law.

It really says to me, at last, I think, that President Obama, who was a constitutional teacher, like Professor John Yoo, Y-O-O, of Berkeley, who authored most of these torture memos in the first placeI think that, like Yoo, Obama has to be seen as either a rotten constitutional lawyer or a man who, like Yoo, believes that the Constitution simply does not bound an American prisoner in any way in an indefinite law of torture. And either way, I believe we have here impeachable offenses by all of the people arguing this case, including the three senatorsMcCain, otherswho will be arguing today on this. We should be looking at Brennan and the other people connected with the torture program not in terms of confirmation hearings, but in terms of impeachment hearings and convictions.

AMY GOODMAN: The case is called Hedges v. Obama. A number of people are involvedChris Hedges, the writer, who says ifyou know, he's one of thepart of a team at The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He's pressed this case, to his great credit. I have great admiration for Hedges.

AMY GOODMAN: says that if he is talking to someone who the United States deems terrorist, he could end up in jail himself, as a journalist. Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, you yourself, Dan Ellsberg, the premier whistleblower of this country.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: For talking to Jake Appelbaum, right here, who has been identified at one point, an earlier point, as a spokesperson from WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning right now is on trial in military court with the absurd and unconstitutional charge of aiding the enemy without any element of intent, merely that his information would get to ObamaI'm sorry, to Osama bin Laden or to al-Qaeda eventually, thus making it, in effect, a terrorist organization. But giving it to WikiLeaks is very like saying that WikiLeaks is the enemy he's aiding and affecting.

Now, simply by associating with Jake, whom I'm proud to do and I'm learning from, or supporting WikiLeaks or Manning as I do, it's very clear that my speech, my First Amendment activities in support of their activities, can be interpreted by the vague, broad terms of this unconstitutional 1021(b)(2) section of the National Defense Authorization Act as, quote, "substantial support to an organization associated with terrorism." These vague terms make it possiblereally there's no one at this table who could be exempt from some informed official, who we've now learned has the power to defendto condemn us to death. And, of course, if you can do that, I'm sure they can feel quite easy about simply putting us in military custody like Bradley Manning, even though we're not in the military.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, this law is unprecedented in U.S. history. Can you talk about what

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, as a law, it's unprecedented, but as a practicewhat we've seen for the last 10 years is a systematic assault on the Constitution of the United States in every aspectin the aspects of the illegal surveillance, the warrantless surveillance, which was conducted against me 40 years ago by President Nixon and then led to his impeachment proceedings, but is now regarded as legal. That's the way the law has changed. Efforts to assault me or kill me on the steps of the Capitol on May 3rd, 1972, a presidential hit squad of the kind that the president now takes pride in proclaiming that he runs all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: But explain, for people who don't know your story, how was it 40 years ago that you're saying you could have been

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, 40 years ago, I was on trial for the same offense, essentially, as Bradley Manning, though he was in the military. As a former civilian official, I released 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating lies, crimes, treaty violations by the American government that had lied us into a wrongful and hopeless war and were killing Americans and others at a great rate as it went on. For that, I was facing 115 years in prison, just as Bradley Manning is now facing life charges, essentially the same. In my case, the crimethe then-crimes against me of illegal surveillance, warrantless surveillance, the use of the CIA against me, now legal under the PATRIOT Act, and a hit squad against me, now allegedly legal by the president, all those things figured in impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: And it led to his resignation. They should lead, right nowwe've seen this assault. The time has comeand Katherine Forrest has shown the way, I thinkto defend the Constitution and try to restore it to the rights of Americans.

[Peter Lemkin]

Reform the Patriot Act | Section 215

What is Section 215?
Section 215 allows the FBI to order any person or entity to turn over "any tangible things," so long as the FBI "specif[ies]" that the order is "for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
Section 215 vastly expands the FBI's power to spy on ordinary people living in the United States, including United States citizens and permanent residents.
The FBI need not show probable cause, nor even reasonable grounds to believe, that the person whose records it seeks is engaged in criminal activity.
The FBI need not have any suspicion that the subject of the investigation is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.
The FBI can investigate United States persons based in part on their exercise of First Amendment rights, and it can investigate non-United States persons based solely on their exercise of First Amendment rights.
For example, the FBI could spy on a person because they don't like the books she reads, or because they don't like the web sites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy.
Those served with Section 215 orders are prohibited from disclosing the fact to anyone else. Those who are the subjects of the surveillance are never notified that their privacy has been compromised.
If the government had been keeping track of what books a person had been reading, or what web sites she had been visiting, the person would never know.
Is Section 215 Constitutional?
Normally, the government cannot effect a search without obtaining a warrant and showing probable cause to believe that the person has committed or will commit a crime. Section 215 violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government to effect Fourth Amendment searches without a warrant and without showing probable cause.
The violation of the Fourth Amendment is made more egregious by the fact that Section 215 might be used to obtain information about the exercise of First Amendment rights. For example, the FBI could invoke Section 215 to require a library to produce records showing who had borrowed a particular book or to produce records showing who had visited a particular web site.
Section 215 might also be used to obtain material that implicates privacy interests other than those protected by the First Amendment. For example, the FBI could use Section 215 to obtain medical records.
The provision violates the First Amendment by prohibiting those served with Section 215 orders from disclosing that fact to others, even where there is no real need for secrecy.
The provision violates the First Amendment by effectively authorizing the FBI to investigate U.S. persons, including American citizens, based in part on their exercise of First Amendment activity, and by authorizing the FBI to investigate non-U.S. persons based solely on their exercise of First Amendment activity.
The provision violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments by failing to require that those who are the subject of Section 215 orders be told that their privacy has been compromised.
Doesn't the government need these powers?
The government already has the authority to prosecute anyone whom it has probable cause to believe has committed or is planning to commit a crime. It also has the authority to engage in surveillance of anyone whom it has probable cause to believe is a foreign power or spy - whether or not the person is suspected of any crime.
Section 215 takes away a great deal of our liberty and privacy but isn't likely to get us any security in return.
There's a real possibility that setting the FBI loose on the American public will have a profound chilling effect on public discourse. If people think that their conversations and their e-mails are their reading habits are being monitored, people will inevitably feel less comfortable saying what they think, especially if what they think is not what the government wants them to think.

[Albert Doyle]

CISPA passed on April 18th.

[Magda Hassan]

Somewhere Everywhere, Big Brother Is Smiling: Congress Sells Your Privacy For A Cool $84 Million

from the $84M-isn't-money;-it's-a-motive-with-a-universal-adapter dept

In case you were wondering why so many Democrats switched sides during the most recent CISPA vote, the answer is exactly what you think it is: $$$. And lots of it. Last year's CISPA vote only managed to secure 40 Democrat supporters. This time around, the number leapt to 92.

[A] new coalition of special interests, which include America's two largest cellular service providers AT&T, Inc. and Verizon Wireless -- jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc. -- as well as two of the nation's largest software firms Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., came together to create a similar data grab bill (Microsoft has since renounced its support). Security firms like Symantec Corp. also backed the bill.

Pushing the bill through was $84M USD in funding from special interest backers.

$84 million is change-of-heart money, although one imagines those contributing checked and double-checked their "sponsored" representatives to make sure they were all on the same page. As DailyTech points out, nearly $86 million went into the SOPA push and most of that turned out to be wasted money.

Last Monday, two hundred IBM executives visited the White House to make a last minute push for CISPA. Whatever they said or did must have been very persuasive. By the end of the day, 36 new sponsors had signed on to the bill, up from a very lonely two previous to IBM's visit. Unsurprisingly, financial motivation was involved, according to numbers gathered by Maplight.

New co-sponsors have received 38 times as much money ($7,626,081) from interests supporting CISPA than from interests opposing ($200,362).

Members of the House in total have received 16 times as much money ($67,665,694) from interests supporting CISPA than from interests opposing ($4,164,596).

Now, it's up to Senate to come up with some sort of cyber-security bill that has a chance to get passed and dodge a Presidential veto. Fortunately, there's no clear favorite at the moment (although Lieberman's bill seems to have the President's blessing) and with the limited number of voters, the Senate is much more prone to be gridlocked by partisan politics. Of course, a daylong visit by a few lobbyists could win over just enough hearts and minds to be dangerous. In the meantime, it would probably do these senators a world of good to hear from their constituents, if only to remind them that there are plenty of actual people out there who have to live with the consequences of bad legislation.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2013041...lion.shtml

[Magda Hassan]

Oh Look, Rep. Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing...

Document at link below.

from the no-conflict,-no-interest dept

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. It's somewhat amazing that no one has really covered this part of the story, but it highlights, yet again, the kind of activities by folks in Congress that make the public trust Congress less and less.

It has seemed quite strange to see how strongly Rogers has been fighting for CISPA, refusing to even acknowledge the seriousness of the privacy concerns. At other times, he can't even keep his own story straight about whether or not CISPA is about giving information to the NSA (hint: it is). And then there was the recent ridiculousness with him insisting that the only opposition to CISPA came from 14-year-old kids in their basement. Wrong and insulting.

Of course, as we've noted all along, all attempts at cybersecurity legislation have always been about money. Mainly, money to big defense contractors aiming to provide the government with lots of very expensive "solutions" to the cybersecurity "problem" -- a problem that still has not been adequately defined beyond fake scare stories. Just last month, Rogers accidentally tweeted (and then deleted) a story about how CISPA supporters, like himself, had received 15 times more money from pro-CISPA group that the opposition had received from anti-CISPA groups.

So it seems rather interesting to note that Rogers' wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was, until recently, the president and CEO of Aegis LLC a "security" defense contractor company, whom she helped to secure a $10 billion (with a b) contract with the State Department. The company describes itself as "a leading private security company, provides government and corporate clients with a full spectrum of intelligence-led, culturally-sensitive security solutions to operational and development challenges around the world."

Hmm. Sounds like a company like that would benefit greatly to seeing a big ramp up in cybersecurity FUD around the globe, and, with it, big budgets by various government agencies to spend on such things. Indeed, just a few months ago, Rogers penned an article for Washington Life Magazine all about evil hackers trying to "steal information." In it, there's a line that might sound a wee-bit familiar, referring to the impression of hackers as being "the teenager in his or her parent's basement with bunny slippers and a Mountain Dew." Apparently, both of the Rogers really have a thing about teens in basements. The article is typical FUD, making statements with no proof, including repeating the NSA's ridiculous allegation that hackers have led to the "greatest transfer of wealth in American history." It's such a good line, except that it's completely untrue. The top US companies have recently admitted to absolutely no damage from such attacks. The article also lumps in "hacktivists" like Anonymous, as if they're a part of this grand conspiracy that needs new laws.

Tellingly, in the print version of Washington Life that this article appeared in, which you can see embedded below, you'll note that there's a side bar right next to her article about the importance of passing cybersecurity legislation in Congress. Guess what's not mentioned anywhere at all? The fact that Kristi Rogers, author of the fear-mongering article, happens to be married to Rep. Mike Rogers, the guy in charge of pushing through cybersecurity legislation. That sure seems like a rather key point, and a major conflict of interest that neither seemed interested in disclosing. Oh, and Kristi Rogers recently changed jobs as well, such that she's now the "managing director of federal government affairs and public policies" at Manatt a big lobbying firm, where (surprise, surprise) she's apparently focused on "executive-level problem solving in the defense and homeland security sectors." I'm sure having CISPA in place will suddenly create plenty of demand for such problem solving.

A few months ago, on one of his FUD-filled talks about why we need cybersecurity, Rogers claimed that it was all so scary that he literally couldn't sleep at night until CISPA was passed due to an "unusual source" threatening us. The whole statement seemed odd, until you realize that his statement came out at basically the same time as his wife's fear-mongering article about cybersecurity. I guess when your pillow talk is made up boogeyman stories about threats that don't actually exist, it might make it difficult to fall asleep.

Either way, even if we assume that everything here was done aboveboard -- and we're not suggesting it wasn't -- this is exactly the kind of situation that Larry Lessig has referred to as soft corruption. It's not bags of money shifting hands, but it appears highly questionable to the public, leading the public to trust Congress a lot less. At the very least, in discussing all of this stuff, when Mrs. Rogers is writing articles that help the push for CISPA, it seems only fair to disclose that she's married to the guy pushing for the bill. And when Mr. Rogers is pushing for the bill, it seems only right to disclose that his wife almost certainly would benefit from the bill passing. And yet, that doesn't seem to have happened... anywhere.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2013041...sing.shtml