Marcy Wheeler has picked up on an interesting claim made in the CIA’s “We Did Nothing Wrong” report. This report — an in-house investigation of the CIA’s snooping on/hacking Senate staffers during the compilation of the Torture Report — tossed out the Inspector General’s findings and cleared the agency of any misconduct. It then went on to disingenuously claim that it was the Senate, not the CIA, that broke the rules.
According to the CIA’s investigators, Senate staffers accessed documents they weren’t supposed to see, apparently by “abusing” the shared network set up explicitly for the Torture Report compilation. What Wheeler spotted — in a very thorough fisking of the CIA investigative report by Katherine Hawkins of Just Security — is the attempted criminalization of Google searches.
Month: February 2015
Giganews Wins Again in Perfect 10 Copyright Battle
Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 is one of the most litigious publishers in the online space.
The company has made a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement and in recent years has targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, RapidShare and Depositfiles, and even hosting providers LeaseWeb and OVH.
While Perfect 10 has secured several private settlements, court victories in contested cases have not been forthcoming. The publisher had hoped of success in its current and prolonged legal battle with Usenet provider Giganews but things are not going well.
In a November 2014 ruling the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. The provider now has further reason to celebrate thanks to a ruling from the same Court.
Rather than simply roll over under pressure from Perfect 10’s legal team, Giganews put up a vigorous and comprehensive defense to the publisher’s claims. During 2014 Giganews sought and obtained several discovery orders requiring the adult publisher to produce potentially huge amounts of data relating to its claim against the provider
(…)
Perfect 10 didn’t even produce evidence related to the infringement at the heart of the case.
EFF Files Petitions to Protect Your Rights to Tinker, Repair, and Remix
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed petitions with the U.S. Copyright Office seeking to keep users who remix DVD content or jailbreak their devices from losing their legal safe harbors and to establish new rights for those who need to circumvent “access control” or “digital rights management” (DRM) technologies for activities such as conducting security research, repairing cars, and resuscitating old video games. The petitions were submitted as part of the complex, triennial rulemaking process that determines exemptions from Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
With the passage of the DMCA in 1998, Congress created “anti-circumvention” measures, ostensibly designed to prevent people from undermining DRM for purposes of copyright infringement. Recognizing that the law could impede lawful and important uses of copyrighted works, Congress included a provision in which the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress are tasked with deciding which activities should and should not be exempted every three years through a complicated legal process.
The rulemaking process allows organizations like EFF to fight for the rights that digital businesses and consumers should already have. Even when petitions are successful, groups such as EFF still need to fight for each exemption to be reinstated each cycle.
EFF Responds to USTR Bullying the World to Repeat Our Copyright Mistakes
From the same agency that brought you the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the United States Trade Representative (USTR)—comes a lesser-known, but also insidious global intellectual property gambit: the Special 301 Report. The Special 301 Report is a survey conducted under the auspices of the Trade Act and has been issued every year since 1989. The USTR, like a malevolent Santa Claus, assesses whether the other countries of the world have been naughty or nice in their treatment of U.S. intellectual property holders, and raps them over the knuckles if they don’t come up to scruff.
This would be absolutely fair enough, if the standards by which the other countries were assessed were globally-agreed standards, and if their adherence to those standards were assessed objectively, using a consistent and predictable methodology. But they’re not; rather, the USTR has free reign to castigate its trading partners for whatever reasons it can come up with. And it’s never short for ideas, because the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) supply complaints galore in the phonebook-length submissions that they file every year.
Is Your Child a Terrorist? U.S. Government Questionnaire Rates Families at Risk for Extremism
Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept.
The document–and the rating system–is part of a wider strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, which calls for local community and religious leaders to work together with law enforcement and other government agencies. The White House has made this approach a centerpiece of its response to terrorist attacks around the world and in the wake of the Paris attacks, announced plans to host an international summit on Countering Violent Extremism on February 18th.
The rating system, part of a 36-page document dated May 2014 and titled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts,” suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as: “Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,” “Talk of Harming Self or Others,” and “Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity).” The ranking system is supposed to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies.
Families are judged on factors such as “Aware[ness] of Each Other’s Activities,” as well as levels of “Parent-Child Bonding,” and communities are rated by access to health care and social services, in addition to “presence of ideologues or recruiters” as potential risk factors.
A low score in any of these categories would indicate a high risk of “susceptibility to engage in violent extremism,” according to the document. It encourages users of the guide to plot the scores on a graph to determine what “interventions” could halt the process of radicalization before it happens.
“The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical and social service employees to rate the communities, individuals and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. German called the criteria used for the ratings “subjective and specious.”
Content Protection Company Makes Bogus ContentID Claims On Gameplay Videos; Sega Steps In To Clean The Mess Up
YouTube’s ContentID system is again being abused to take videos out of the control of the uploaders. The latest wave of bogus ContentID claims comes from (possibly) Japan’s eLicense, which is seemingly staking a claim to as many Sega-related videos as possible in order to siphon ad money away from the account holders. (via GamePolitics)
One YouTube account holder was hit with over 100 ContentID claims alone, while others have had some hits and some misses. Nowhere on eLicense’s site does it say the company is authorized to make ContentID claims on behalf of Sega. Sega America has since responded to the uproar, denying having anything to do with the hundreds of filed claims.
Regarding eLicense, this company is not working on behalf of SEGA in any capacity. We are issuing a Cease & Desist to eLicense and reaching out to YouTube directly to work on resolving this problem.
eLicense is acting independently and Sega intends to take the necessary action to prevent this from happening again.
Please help us in spreading the word wherever you see it online, feel free to link back to this post. Thanks all for reporting and documenting this issue!
Waterboarding Whistleblower Released From Prison, Two Months After Torture Report’s Release Vindicated His Actions
Guess who went to jail because of the CIA’s long-running, illegal torture programs.
It wasn’t former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn’t any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn’t the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of “national security.”
The single person to be put behind bars thanks to the CIA’s torture programs was the man who blew the whistle on the agency’s waterboarding: John Kiriakou. Now, he’s finally free again (mostly), two months after the Torture Report that corroborates his allegations was released.
Kiriakou is serving out the remainder of his sentence for “revealing an undercover operative’s identity” under house arrest. While still imprisoned, Kiriakou wondered aloud (in the Los Angeles Times) why Panetta wasn’t facing similar charges, considering the former CIA head had disclosed far more sensitive information, including the names of SEAL operatives to a civilian — the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty.
Order on One Millionth Discovery Dispute
“Hey, guys, I think the judge is starting to lose patience with all the discovery disputes in this case.”
“Why do you say that?”
KickassTorrents Taken Down By Domain Name Seizure
With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is one the most used torrent sites on the Internet.
The site’s popularity has made it a prime target for copyright holders, many of whom would like to see the site taken offline.
To evade law enforcement and ease pressure from the entertainment industries, KAT has moved domain on a few occasions over the past several years. Most recently the site has been operating from the Kickass.so domain.
The Somalian .so TLD appeared to be a relatively safe haven, but today it’s apparent that this isn’t the case. About an hour ago the Kickass.so domain status listing was updated to “banned.”
Ferguson, Mo., police begin testing new ‘less-lethal’ attachment for guns
About a month after a white officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., the city’s assistant police chief, Al Eickhoff, took to Google and searched under the words “less lethal.”
Eickhoff, a 36-year veteran of Missouri police work, said he was looking for any new device, weapon or ammunition — any alternative to lethal force — that might have prevented a deadly result when Michael Brown and Officer Darren Wilson encountered each other in the noonday heat last August.
Browsing a California company’s Web site, Eickhoff found pictures and videos of an odd-looking, blaze-orange device docked on a normal handgun barrel. When a bullet fired, it melded with an attached projectile the size of a ping-pong ball that flew with enough force to knock a person down, maybe break some ribs, but not kill him, the product’s makers said — even at close range.
Its name: the Alternative.
Great, but how about actually teaching officers gun safety and incident management, instead of letting them shoot at anything that moves?