Category: Internet

The Good News

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The 6th Circuit of Appeals has ruled that law enforcement agencies must secure a warrant before seizing emails from Internet Service Providers.

While I am certain that Barack Obama, Eric “Place” Holder, and their Evil Minions™ will attempt to get this overturned by the Supreme Court

The full EFF press release is below the break:

Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment

News Update by Kevin Bankston

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

EFF filed a similar amicus brief with the 6th Circuit in 2006 in a civil suit brought by criminal defendant Warshak against the government for its warrantless seizure of his emails. There, the 6th Circuit agreed with EFF that email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected expectation of privacy in the email they store with their email providers, though that decision was later vacated on procedural grounds. Warshak’s appeal of his criminal conviction has brought the issue back to the Sixth Circuit, and once again the court has agreed with EFF and held that email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their email accounts.

As the Court held today,

Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication [like postal mail and telephone calls], it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection…. It follows that email requires strong protection under the Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would prove an ineffective guardian of private communication, an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve…. [T]he police may not storm the post office and intercept a letter, and they are likewise forbidden from using the phone system to make a clandestine recording of a telephone call–unless they get a warrant, that is. It only stands to reason that, if government agents compel an ISP to surrender the contents of a subscriber’s emails, those agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search, which necessitates compliance with the warrant requirement….

Today’s decision is the only federal appellate decision currently on the books that squarely rules on this critically important privacy issue, an issue made all the more important by the fact that current federal law–in particular, the Stored Communications Act–allows the government to secretly obtain emails without a warrant in many situations. We hope that this ruling will spur Congress to update that law as EFF and its partners in the Digital Due Process coalition have urged, so that when the government secretly demands someone’s email without probable cause, the email provider can confidently say: “Come back with a warrant.”

Attachment Size

warshak_opinion_121410.pdf 316.97 KB

(emphasis original)

Assange Jailed

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Note that he has not been charged, and the warrant is for an interview, a British magistrate has ordered Julian Assange held without bail after he turned himself in voluntarily.

Tell me that the fix is not in here.

Of course, the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, have his ITEOD* file, and some number probably greater than 10 people have the code to decrypt those unredacted files has got to give the people pursuing him cause to pause.

*In The Event Of Death.

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Has Nothing to Fear from the CIA or FBI

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On the other hand, he would be worried about finding Polonium in his coffee, courtesy of the Russian FSB:

Yesterday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Security Agency is aware that the FSB — the post-Soviet KGB — is closely monitoring Wikileaks, though the U.S. has no “direct evidence” that the Russians are behind the days-long denial-of-service attacks that have brought down the Wikileaks website over and over again.

But why would the Russians care that much? In part, because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said that between the leaked cables and other information he got separately, high-level corrupt Russian officials should be worried. And some observers think that Assange’s efforts to expose corruption in Russia could be more harmful to his site and himself than exposing America’s secrets have been. One law enforcement source told The Daily Beast, “The Russians play by different rules,” adding that they would be “ruthless” in their attempts to stop him.

(emphasis mine)

Russian leaders don’t get worried, they get proactive, as in the subject of their concern ends up mailed to his family in a dozen parcel post packages, or they die mysteriously.

Posting From the Road

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In preparation for a long Thanksgiving drive, I decided to set up my new phone, a Samsung Epic 4G, to tether to my laptop.

It turns out that it’s disabled by Sprint, unless you want to pay an additional $30.00/month for the privilege.

Luckily, the phone is an Android™, and not, for example, an iPhone™, so:

  • I turned on USB debugging mode.
  • Downloaded an application to root the phone.
  • Unzipped the file.
  • Ran a batch file.
  • Downloaded Google’s Android-Wifi-Tether to the phone, and installed it.
  • Set up the name and password.
  • Turned off USB debugging mode.

So, now I am posting this to you through my cell phone’s WiFi connection on my laptop while on I-295.*

In any case, this reveals how a more open architecture than the Apple/iPhone can let one take full advantage of the capabilities of the phone that you actually paid for.

Sweet, though I still think that Android’s Calendar is kind of weak.

In any case, I am posting this from my laptop in  moving car, and theoretically, we could have up to 4 devices attached.

My thoughts on the phone:

  • The display is positively stunning.
  • The touch screen, which does not require a stylus, is still not completely comfortable to me.
  • Having actual multi-tasking is useful, though one has to be careful to not allow something in the background that will kill the battery.
  • The keyboard is very nice.
  • The camera is nice.
  • Reception is much better than my Palm.
  • 4G coverage is kind of spotty, but it is still being built out by Sprint.
  • Posting to the blog from the phone is still a pain, which is one of the reasons that I am tethering the laptop to the phone.  The other reason is so that we could watch Youtubes and the Macy’s Parade.
  • Having real GPS on the phone, as opposed to cell tower triangulation, is wonderful.
  • Wifi mode chews the battery something fierce.  If you don’t have it plugged in when using it, you won’t get much time.

*No, I m not driving, my wife is.  I may be crazy, but I am not stupid.

Yahoo’s Decline

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Click for full (BIG!)size


A Testament to Management Selfishness

I was discussing this graphic on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It details the history of Yahoo’s acquisition activity, and it is grim.

Pretty much everything that they ever bought never made money when they bought it, and never made money after they bought it, and they sold it for a loss.

In any case, someone was wondering why companies keep making purchases like this, and I put in my 2¢:

Carly bought Compaq, and then promptly demanded a raise from the board, since HP was now a larger firm.

Buying this sh%$ provides a justification for upper management to demand a raise, and provides a bump in visibility which raises their profile when they apply for the next position, where they demand even more money.

It’s the virtue of selfishness, baby.*

Basically, this is the problem with corporate governance in the United States, there isn’t any.

Basically, we don’t have managers, we have pillagers running companies in the United States, and it is destroying us.

Not only has our politics become klepto-capitalist, but so has our entire culture, even when the government is not involved.

H/t Barry Ritholtz.

*Why yes, this is a reference to the execrable Ayn Rand’s even more execreable book by the same name, why do you ask?

Surprise, the Pentagon Lied Again

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This time, it was not that the wedding party that they bombed was a terrorist base camp. This time, we get the updated report, and it is determined that the DoD found no compromise of its intelligence capabilities from the Wikileaks documents dump:

The unauthorized release of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military records from the war in Afghanistan last July on the Wikileaks website did not result in the disclosure of sensitive intelligence sources, according to a mid-August assessment by the Department of Defense that has just been made public.

“The review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure,” wrote Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates in an August 16 letter (pdf) to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin.

We get lied into a war. We get lied to during the war. We have a war on whistle blowers who reveal the lies.

Without accurate information, the public can never weigh in in the policies of its government, and this is a very bad thing.

Obama Doubles Down on Bush Policies Again

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He is proposing mandating a back door in pretty much every form of communication on the internet:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

This would mean that if you had two people communicating handling their own encryption, which a little program called PGP has been doing for decades, they would have to make it illegal.

Obama, a former lecturer on constitutional law, should know better. He is operating under the assumption that because he’s a good guy,* it’s OK for him to have this power, which is, of course completely antithetical to the most basic foundation of the constitution.

Some pertinent quotes:

But as an example, one official said, an investigation into a drug cartel earlier this year was stymied because smugglers used peer-to-peer software, which is difficult to intercept because it is not routed through a central hub. Agents eventually installed surveillance equipment in a suspect’s office, but that tactic was “risky,” the official said, and the delay “prevented the interception of pertinent communications.”

And, of course, there is nothing to prevent these guys from using similar software, and there is already a work around, as the official have admitted.

Even worse is this argument:

Moreover, according to several other officials, after the failed Times Square bombing in May, investigators discovered that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, had been communicating with a service that lacked prebuilt interception capacity. If he had aroused suspicion beforehand, there would have been a delay before he could have been wiretapped.

Translation:

  • We had that there was a plan afoot.
  • We had no clue that Shahzad was involved with the Taliban.
  • We had no clue that the Taliban was looking at doing anything in the US, though the fact that we are dropping missiles on men, women, and children in their country might give them some motivation.
  • Having this capability would not have allowed us to determine any of the above.
  • However, if we had somehow discovered that this guy was hooking up with terrorists, it would have been easier to wiretap him.

There is also the fact that if you create a back door, it becomes a point of vulnerability for every hacker, crook, terrorist, or despot out there:

Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.

“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”

Why there is such a determination by the Obama administration to embrace and extend every wrong-headed and un-American policy thought up by Bushand His Evil Minions™ is beyond me.

Doubling down on failed and expensive polices does not help.

* To the degree that someone who feels that he can be king and order the murder of American citizens for secret reasons can be considered a “good guy”.

White Spaces Passes FCC

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White Spaces at a Glance:
“A” can use 400 MHz without interfering with anyone

Which means that it’s now official, and any number of high speed wireless devices will be able to operate without a license in the spaces between TV channels:

The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously approved new rules for the use of unlicensed white space spectrum in a move that could pave the way for more unused wireless spectrum to be released in the future.

White space is unused spectrum that sits between TV channels. The 300MHz to 400MHz of unused spectrum is considered prime spectrum for offering wireless broadband services because it can travel long distances and penetrate through walls. The FCC unanimously agreed in November 2008 to open up this spectrum for unlicensed use. Even so, technical issues to allow device makers and service providers to use the spectrum still need to be worked out.

(emphasis mine)

The technical issues are a big deal, because, as the redoubtable Harold Feld notes, the devil is really in the details here, and the incumbent wireless providers want to require that devices ping themselves to death:

Right now, the rules require a Mode 2 (the ones that access the database directly) to ping the database every 24 hours. Mode 1 devices “listen” to Mode 2, according to the 2008 Order (which I understand means “get told when an actual change occurs). The broadcasters want the Mode 1 devices to ping the Mode 2s every 60 seconds and want Mode 2 to ping the database every 15 minutes, if not more frequently. Since television broadcast towers are big stationary things, not Ents marching on Isengard, one may ask why devices need to check more than once a day. In response, broadcasters explain that if some day some news team somewhere they might possibly be running down the street after some hot news lead if they ran into someone using a smart phone with white spaces capability it might, possibly, cause some sort of interference with the mobile news crew’s wireless microphone system.

At this time, it appears that they did not go with the ping of death regulations, nor did they require “Sense and Avoid” technology, which is purported to be both expensive and technically challenging.

One of the big things here is the geographical database: If the TV stations start making bogus claims of interference, we may end up with a situation where the coverage will be limited to remote rural areas.

I Expect This to Be a Prelude to Regulatory Capitulation

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The FCC is now saying that it will delay any ruling on net neutrality until after the election.

I take this as a sign that Obama, and FCC Chair Genachowski intend to sell out completely to the incumbent telcos and cable companies, but they do not want to enrage the netroots base, as well of the users of a little service called Facebook, see the survey numbers on social media users, really care about preserving net neutrality.

In my opinion, they are waiting until after the election to screw the base in order to benefit the big players, and they know that this will cost them votes if it comes out in September of October.

I should note however, that the redoubtable Harold Feld, who does this for a living, is more optimistic than I am about such things.

How to Link to People When You Do Not Want to Raise their Google™ Page Rank

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Frequently people who I consider to be bad actors say things that I want to note.

In a blog, of course, you are supposed to link to them, that is what the World Wide Web is supposed to be about.

On the other hand, I do not want to drive traffic to their site.

One way of handling it, as I do with Associated Press stories, is to find alternate links. (here Google News is your friend)

Well, our good friends at Tech Crunch have provided an alternate, and somewhat less severe way to handle this, the nofollow tag, which tells Google not to follow the tag, so you won’t boost their google page ranking.

Here is an example from the Wiki:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>

The tag was created by Google, but Yahoo, Ask.com, and Bing also follow this convention.

I’m not sure under which circumstances I would employ this tag, as opposed to finding an alternate link, except, perhaps, when there is no alternate link.

Yeah, Sure, Nothing to See Here

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Tell Me That You Do Not Believe That This is a Setup

So, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange goes to Sweden to setup a server, because Swedish laws, and the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) in the constitution, as well as an offer from the Swedish Pirate Party to host for him.

Wouldn’t you know it, Swedish authorities issued a rape warrant against Mr. Assange, and then withdrew the warrant the next day.

It couldn’t be that the CIA, the Pentagon (DIA), or the DNI were behind these apparently now bogus charges could it?

As Capt Howdy observes, it’s like we are living in that, “horrific thru the looking glass universe where Nixon is serving his 5th term.” (a Watchman reference, and yes, it would now be the 11th term)

As to my legal mind, my guess is that at this moment, some Swedish prosecutor is reviewing the laws on suborning perjury, and hoping that they don’t apply to him.

As a practical matter, I would suggest that the rest of the folks at Wikileaks start dealing with the “Julian Assange commits suicide by shooting himself in the head 3 times and then throws himself off a bridge,” contingency.

Obama Consensus Building: The Incumbent Oligopolies Win, We Lose

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Google and Verizon have released the details of their carve up the internet among the big players proposal:

Google Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. on Monday called for equal treatment of most Internet traffic while at the same time saying fast-growing cellular networks and yet-to-be-developed broadband services should be exempt from such restrictions.

Google and Verizon released a proposal arguing that broadband providers shouldn’t be able to discriminate against Internet content providers. Marcelo Prince and Amy Schatz discuss. Also, Dennis Berman discusses why bond investors are giving up on recovery and jobs.

The ideas outlined in the proposal put forth by the Internet search giant and one of the largest broadband providers stand in contrast to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent proposals on “net neutrality” rules, which would prevent companies from giving preferential handling to certain types of online traffic.

In Google’s case, the proposal’s endorsements of two-tier Internet service and a hands-off approach to cellular-based Web services represent a break with many other online companies, which have argued for strict neutrality in how Internet traffic is treated. Google itself previously expressed general support for rules prohibiting discrimination among forms of Web traffic.

This is a direct consequence of the tenor and approach of Barack Obama. It is clear that in internet access, the incumbents have taken billions of government subsidies, and used this money to cement their monopoly positions, rather than improvement access.

It’s why US internet performance and penetration* is the worst in the developed world.

These are not people who you partner with to get the outcome you want, these are people you defeat to get the outcomes you want.

As to the long term consequences, I’ll go with what Atrios says:

I’m one who thinks that ultimately the forces of light will prevail and the repeated attempts to carve out internet walled gardens will, over the long run, fail as killing the internet would… kill the internet. But the long run is a long time and companies will likely screw and gouge us over the not very short run unless the FCC acts.

So not hopey changey, and as I have said before, this sort of craven acquiescence to the incumbent players who screwed everything in the first place appears to be a core philosophy of Barack Obama and His Clueless Minions™, whether it be telecommunications, finance, healthcare, etc.

*That sounds dirty, doesn’t it?

Google and Verizon Hammer Nails in Net Neutrality’s Coffin

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My guess is that Google has given up on the timid Obama administration, and Obama’s timid FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, who falls over when the incumbent players say “boo”, so Google is throwing in the towel, and is negotiating with Verizon to pay extortion money to insure that it doesn’t get shut out of the telcos last mile:

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Why is Google throwing in the towel?

Well part of it may be because Verizon is a major player in mobile phones, and they don’t want to be locked out:

People close to the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly about them said an agreement could be reached as soon as next week. If completed, Google, whose Android operating system powers many Verizon wireless phones, would agree not to challenge Verizon’s ability to manage its broadband Internet network as it pleased.

Or maybe it’s because all this hopey changey crap is nopey change crap:

Since the court decision, involving Comcast, in April, the F.C.C. has been trying to find a way to regulate broadband delivery, and that effort has been the subject of a series of private meetings at the agency’s headquarters in recent weeks. At the meetings, officials from the nation’s biggest Internet service and content providers, including Google and Verizon, have tried to reach a consensus on how broadband Internet service should be regulated in light of the decision. Those meetings continued this week, apart from the talks between Google and Verizon.

Yes, you have a group of people doing bad things, and destroying a public resource, and even though you have the authority to regulate, all you have to do is redefine broadband, and you are good to go, you are working to, “reach a consensus on how broadband Internet service should be regulated.”

That’s like banks trying to reach a consensus with bank robbers.

The incumbents are not valued members of the community, they are parasites who use an accident of history to attempt to act as highwaymen.

It’s not tough to reregulate this sh%$. You can’t now because a few years back, your Bushco predecessor made it so:

The F.C.C., meanwhile, favors a level playing field, but it cannot impose one as long as its authority over broadband is in legal doubt. It has proposed a solution that would reclassify broadband Internet service under the Communications Act from its current designation as an “information service,” a lightly regulated designation, to a “telecommunications service,” a category that, like telephone service, is subject to stricter regulation.

It’s very simple. Make a new finding. The old one was a payoff to the telcos for campaign bucks, warrantless wiretapping, and a failed free market ideology.

Make that ruling, and then, when you have a big stick, you can get to the rule making.

First, get a firm grip on their balls, and then negotiate.

Remember, we are dealing with The Phone Company here, and to quote Lily Tomlin, “We don’t care, we don’t have to…we’re the phone company.”

They may be essential, but they aren’t allies.

Then again, I’m being an optimist. If you look at the Obama administration’s actions, whether they be healthcare, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, etc., it’s clear that their MO is to talk about reform, and then to give the malefactors what they want, so this could be by design, rather than by incompetence or cowardice.

In either case, treating the Obama Administration, and their FCC Chairman as the enemy and a bad faith player still gives activists the best policy, so I would suggest that this is what net neutrality activists do.

Avoid the veal pen conference calls, and light fires under them.

The Teabaggers Oregon Chapter is Doomed

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Click for full size

The Stupidity, shortly followed by


The Groveling Apology

The Oregon division of the teabaggers, AKA the “Oregon Tea Party,” decided to steal the slogan of Anonymous on 4chan.

Anonymous is/are a group of people who took on the Church of Scientology, and pretty much won.

Anonyous took action: There was a flood of pr0n links and the like on the Oregon Teabaggers’ Facebook page, which has now been taken down, though not before the Teabaggers posted a sycophantic apology (see pic).

Heh.

Stuff like this is why 4chan is firmly on my list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.