The French government wants to block terrorist and child porn websites so badly that it’ll even pay for the privilege.
A new implementation of last year’s Terrorism Act (effectively a new decree extending the scope of the existing law) will force internet service providers to block websites within 24 hours if ordered to do so by the police – with no court order required.
However, in a sweetener to the ISPs that might well complain about the “burden” of doing so, the law promises that any costs incurred will be reimbursed.
The stick for non-compliance is a pretty big one – a year in jail and a €75,000 fine. Yet that hasn’t deterred one local access provider, Illico in Corrèze, central France, from rebelling. The body says it will refuse any blocking requests.
Civil liberties groups and open internet advocates are also up in arms.
“The measure only gives the illusion that the state is acting for our safety, while going one step further in undermining fundamental rights online,” said Felix Tréguer, founding member of digital rights group La Quadrature du Net. “We must get it overturned.”
He added that blocking is ineffective since it is easily circumvented, as well as disproportionate because of the risk of blocking perfectly lawful content.
Category: Ignorant or unreasonable
Obama To Germans Worried About NSA Surveillance: ‘Hey, Trust Us!’
It’s often been said that trust is something that you earn — or that you completely destroy in irredeemable ways. So it’s a little bizarre to see President Obama trying to restore German trust in the US (and specifically over NSA surveillance) with a bogus “hey, trust us” line, when his own government has spent the past few years doing everything possible to undermine any residual trust. Yet here he is, in a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, asking for “the benefit of the doubt.”
There are going to still be areas where we’ve got to work through these issues. We have to internally work through some of these issues, because they’re complicated, they’re difficult. If we are trying to track a network that is planning to carry out attacks in New York or Berlin or Paris, and they are communicating primarily in cyberspace, and we have the capacity to stop an attack like that, but that requires us then being able to operate within that cyberspace, how do we make sure that we’re able to do that, carry out those functions, while still meeting our core principles of respecting the privacy of all our people?
And given Germany’s history, I recognize the sensitivities around this issue. What I would ask would be that the German people recognize that the United States has always been on the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, that we have traditions of due process that we respect, that we have been a consistent partner of yours in the course of the last 70 years, and certainly the last 25 years, in reinforcing the values that we share. And so occasionally I would like the German people to give us the benefit of the doubt, given our history, as opposed to assuming the worst — assuming that we have been consistently your strong partners and that we share a common set of values.
And if we have that fundamental, underlying trust, there are going to be times where there are disagreements, and both sides may make mistakes, and there are going to be irritants like there are between friends, but the underlying foundation for the relationship remains sound.
Magistrate Judge Shoots Down Government’s Attempt To Gag Yahoo Indefinitely Over Grand Jury Subpoenas
California judge Paul Grewal continues to hold up his end of the “Magistrates’ Revolt.” Grewal was the magistrate who shot down the government’s open-ended request to grab every email in a person’s Gmail account and sort through them at its leisure. He was actually the second magistrate to shoot down this request. The government went “judge shopping” after Judge John Facciola told it the scope of the request needed to be narrowed considerably before he would even think about granting it. The government decided it still wanted all the email and traveled across the country to see Judge Grewal… who told them to GTFO without even giving the feds the option to rewrite the request.
Grewal is once again siding with the public and acting as a check against government overreach.
Law enforcement cannot indefinitely forbid Yahoo Inc from revealing a grand jury subpoena that seeks subscriber account information, a U.S. judge ruled, because doing so would violate the company’s free speech rights.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal in San Jose, California on Thursday wrote that the government’s request would prohibit Yahoo from disclosing the subpoena, even years after the grand jury concluded its probe. The court order does not disclose the target of the federal investigation.
“In an era of increasing public demand for transparency about the extent of government demands for data from providers like Yahoo!, this cannot stand,” Grewal wrote.
CIA Wanted To Throw The CFAA At Senate Staffers For Unauthorized Googling
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.
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 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.”
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.
Good Man Productions, Inc.: a zombie troll plaintiff
A copyright shakedown outfit lead by M. Keith Lipscomb and his German counterparts recently filed 99 Bittorent cases “on behalf” of Good Man Productions, Inc. Those lawsuits were filed in eight districts in November-December 2014, and the plaintiff alleged infringement of a direct-to-DVD movie Good Man featuring Steven Seagal.
On 1/14/2015 it came to our attention that querying Good Man Productions, Inc. information on the web portal of California Secretary of State revealed that this entity was dissolved. As soon as I reported it, the company suddenly re-appeared, albeit with a different entity number.
Naturally, we were skeptical about the fact that registering a new corporation with the same name would solve a potentially fatal problem.
Can a dissolved copyright holder corporation continue litigating as a plaintiff in infringement cases?
A CA corporation filed dozens of copyright infringement lawsuits in Nov-Dec 2014. On 12/22/2014 it was voluntarily dissolved. Nonetheless, the cases continue, and the courts were not notified.
Are any laws or regulations broken here?After those who actually steer the litigation made aware of publicity in this matter, they re-registered this corporation on 1/16/2015. The name and the agent remained the same, yet the entity number is different.
So the second question: did this move “cure” the issue? Is it a matter of interest for the tax authorities?
One of the answers from an experienced business attorney from California, Frank Chen, confirmed what we suspected (emphasis is mine):
Nope. I assume the corporation was voluntarily dissolved (as opposed to being suspended or involuntarily dissolved through a court decree). A suspended corporation can be revived by paying back taxes, penalties and interest, and filing back tax returns. However, a dissolved corporation cannot be revived. A dissolved corporation would no longer have standing to pursue a lawsuit. Re-registration creates a new corporation, but even if the name and agent for service of process are the same, the entity is not the same entity which was the plaintiff in the lawsuit. The move does not “cure” the issue.
$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience
Having good quality cables when it comes to analogue transfer does probably make some sense. Using an insane amount of money on digital cables, which per definition either works or doesn’t, is insane.
Got £6,899 (US$10,500) to spare and worried that a Cat-6 Ethernet cable is keeping you from hearing the very best of your NAS-stored collection of MP3s?
Fear not, your moment has come, with this work of wonder from Audio Quest.