Fresh
off the scene from those two epic embarrassments, the UN now wants to
tell governments of the world how to censor the internet. I wish I was
kidding.
From the Washington Post:
On
Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital
Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it
calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report
concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” —
which, nbd, we’ve all heard before. But the
United Nations then goes on to propose radical, proactive policy changes
for both governments and social networks, effectively projecting a
whole new vision for how the Internet could work.
Under
U.S. law — the law that, not coincidentally, governs most of the
world’s largest online platforms — intermediaries such as Twitter and
Facebook generally can’t be held responsible for what people do on them.
But the United Nations proposes both that social networks
proactively police every profile and post, and that government agencies
only “license” those who agree to do so.
People are being harassed online, and the solution is to censor everything and license speech? Remarkable.
So
many politicians blatantly push for policies that harm all of us, just
because the special interests that fund their campaigns want them to.
Because
of this, Congress tries to hide -- taking vague positions, pushing for
watered down legislation, or remaining silent at critical moments.
This
week, they’re expected to renew debate on CISA, the Cybersecurity
Information Sharing Act, a bill that would give corporations sweeping
legal immunity when they share your data with the government.
Now more than ever, it’s so important that we don’t let our lawmakers hide in the shadows.
P.S.
As much as we’ve talked about how bad CISA is for expanding mass
surveillance, there’s another side to the law that just made it even
worse. Late last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island
introduced an amendment to expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the
law that has been used time and again to persecute digital activists,
including our friend Aaron Swartz. That’s despicable, and needs to be quashed immediately — so take action now to help kill CISA.
Defiant Apple, Facebook, other firms to inform public of govt surveillance requests
Published time: May 02, 2014 01:07 Edited time: May 02, 2014 06:42
The
same technology companies that the US intelligence community has relied
upon to disclose email records are now refusing to keep surveillance
requests secret and informing customers when they are the subject of
such requests.
In the nearly ten months since former US National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed extensive
surveillance efforts on everyday Americans’ online activity, the
companies that were forced to facilitate that surveillance have come
under harsh public scrutiny.
The embarrassment ignited a series of
comments from executives at Google and Facebook, among others, calling
on the NSA and other agencies to either stop forcing them to provide the
communications that customers trust them with, or allow them to be more
transparent.
Now, according to a Thursday report in the Washington Post,
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have updated their policies to
routinely notify customers when law enforcement has requested
information about them.
Yahoo enacted such a change in July, with the Post reporting Thursday that companies “have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.”
Major
U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly
complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other
online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when
their information is targeted for government seizure.This
increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of
thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal
investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent
disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may
undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy
vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.
Graphic
How the NSA is infiltrating private networks
Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance
of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are
updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about
government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other
legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced
similar changes in July.As this position becomes uniform across the
industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on
the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data
requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify
users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid
having suspects learn of inquiries.
“It serves to chill the
unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a
partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies.
“And I think that’s a good thing.”
The Justice Department
disagrees, saying in a statement that new industry policies threaten
investigations and put potential crime victims in greater peril.
“These
risks of endangering life, risking destruction of evidence, or allowing
suspects to flee or intimidate witnesses are not merely hypothetical,
but unfortunately routine,” department spokesman Peter Carr said, citing
a case in which early disclosure put at risk a cooperative witness in a
case. He declined to offer details because the case was under seal.
The
changing tech company policies do not affect data requests approved by
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which are automatically
kept secret by law. National security letters, which are administrative
subpoenas issued by the FBI for national security investigations, also
carry binding gag orders.
The government traditionally has
notified people directly affected by searches and seizures — though
often not immediately — when investigators entered a home or tapped a
phone line. But that practice has not survived the transition into the
digital world. Cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon typically
do not tell customers when investigators collect their call data.
Many
tech companies once followed a similar model of quietly cooperating
with law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, ruled that it was sufficient
for the government to notify the providers of Internet services of data
requests, rather than the affected customers.
Twitter, founded in
2006, became perhaps the first major tech company to routinely notify
users when investigators collected data, yet few others followed at
first. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation began issuing its
influential “Who Has Your Back?”
report in 2011 — rating companies on their privacy and transparency
policies — Twitter was the only company to get a star under the category
“Tell users about data demands.” Google, the next mostly highly rated,
got half a star from the civil liberties group.
In
2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate
Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you
make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net
neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint
F.C.C. commissioners that support open Internet principles like net
neutrality?”
“The answer is yes,” Obama replied. “I am a strong
supporter of net neutrality.” Explaining, he said, “What you’ve been
seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various
portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet
should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to
different Web sites…. And that I think destroys one of the best things
about the Internet—which is that there is this incredible equality
there.”
If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler,
has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of
this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama
warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging
Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”
Federal
regulators are expected to release draft net neutrality rules in
mid-May as part of an ongoing effort to craft rules for Internet traffic
that might actually hold up in court.
Federal Communications
Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said Wednesday that the agency would
consider draft “Open Internet,” or net neutrality, rules at an agency
meeting May 15. As we reported
in February, Wheeler will propose basically the same rules that the
agency had tried before, but justify them under a different part of the
law.
Consumer groups have complained about that plan because
they’re worried that Wheeler’s rules may not hold up in court either. A
federal appeals court rejected two previous versions of net neutrality
rules after finding fault in the FCC’s legal reasoning. During the
latest smackdown, however, the court suggested that the FCC had some
authority to impose net neutrality rules under a section of the law that
gives the agency the ability to regulate the deployment of broadband
lines.
Internet activists would prefer that the FCC just re-regulate Internet
lines under old rules designed for telephone networks, which they say
would give the agency clear authority to police Internet lines. Wheeler
has rejected that approach for now. Phone and cable companies, including
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, have vociferously fought that idea over
the past few years.
What if you had only three weeks before the Internet you know and love was about to disappear?
Would you spend your time binging on listicles or the final season of Breaking Bad? Or would you do something about it?
Would
you email all your friends with the news? Blast your social media
networks? Demand that Congress and the president keep this amazing
invention from going away?
If the Internet had only three weeks left, would you take to the streets and raise hell?
I bet you would.
And
here's your chance to prove it: Because three weeks from today the
Internet as we know it may not disappear, but it could be a lot closer
to the precipice.
On May 15, the Federal Communications Commission
will propose a new set of rules that are supposed to stop big phone and
cable companies from blocking websites or discriminating against apps
and services they don't like. Only as written the rules would do pretty
much the opposite.
According to numeroussources,
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal would allow Internet service
providers like Verizon or Time Warner Cable to charge extra fees to
content companies like Google and Netflix for preferential treatment,
guaranteeing their content reaches end-users ahead of those that don't
pay.
In other words: Goodbye, open Internet. Hello, payola Schminternet.
By Chris Strohm - Nov 15, 2013 10:42 AM CT Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. are fighting back against the National Security Agency by using harder-to-crack code to shield their networks and online customer data from unauthorized U.S. spying.
The
companies, burned by disclosures they’ve cooperated with U.S.
surveillance programs, are protecting user e-mail and social-media posts
with strengthened encryption that the U.S. government says won’t be
easily broken until 2030. Enlarge image
The National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photographer: NSA via Getty Images
The
NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad in order to siphon off data
from Google and Yahoo, circumvented or cracked encryption, and covertly
introduced weaknesses and back doors into digital coding, according to
reports in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the U.K.’s
Guardian newspaper based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
While
the NSA may find ways around the barriers, the companies say they have
to assure users their online connections are secure and data can’t be
grabbed when transmitted over fiber-optic networks or digitally stored. Microsoft Corp.
is convinced it must “invest in protecting customers’ information from a
wide range of threats, which if the allegations are true, include
governments,” Matt Thomlinson, general manager of trustworthy computing,
said in an e-mail. He didn’t provide details.
Internet companies
including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple Inc. are trying
to distance themselves from news reports that they gave the agency data
on electronic communications of Americans and foreigners or have lax
security.
While the companies are trying to prevent the NSA from
gaining unauthorized access to their data, they say they comply with
legal court orders compelling them to provide the government
information.
The NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad in order
to siphon off data from Google and Yahoo, circumvented or cracked
encryption, and covertly introduced weaknesses and back doors into
coding, according to reports in the Washington Post, the New York Times
and the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper based on documents leaked by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Game On
Companies
are fighting back primarily by using increasingly complex encryption,
which scrambles data using a mathematical formula that can be decoded
only with a special digital key. The idea is to protect sensitive
information like e-mails, Internet searches and digital calls.
Google
has accelerated efforts to encrypt information flowing between its data
centers, doubled the length of its digital keys and implemented
measures to detect fraudulent certificates for verifying the
authenticity of websites, according to a statement from the Mountain
View, California-based company.
NSA spy programs have “the great
potential for doing serious damage to the competitiveness” of U.S.
companies, Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and
information security, told a Senate subcommittee Nov. 13.
“It’s
very important that the users of our services understand that we are
stewards of their data, we hold it responsibly, we treat it with
respect,” Salgado said. “We’ve already seen impacts on the businesses.”
Government Threat
Google,
Yahoo and Facebook generated $44.4 billion in advertising revenue so
far in 2013 in part by mining users’ private data, according to
Bloomberg Industries.
An Aug. 14 analysis by Forrester Research Inc. analyst James Staten found the U.S. cloud computing industry could lose as much as $180 billion by 2016 due to the spying disclosures.
Yahoo
will make encrypted connections standard by January for all its Mail
users with 2048-bit digital keys, Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for the
Sunnyvale, California-based company, said in an e-mail.
Facebook,
in addition to moving toward 2048-bit encryption keys, is accelerating a
tactic known as “perfect forward secrecy” that prevents the NSA from
deciphering the communications of users if it obtains a security code, Jodi Seth, a company spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. Read More Here
...........
Battle brews as tech companies attempt to fend off NSA hacking
Google,
Facebook, Yahoo, and others are all improving their data encryption to
discourage the NSA from accessing user information.
The NSA allegedly gathered millions of records from Google and Yahoo data centers around the world, but soon, the agency might have a much harder time trying to collect this type of data.
Google,
Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and other prominent technology companies are
investing heavily in stronger, 2048-bit encryption. Due to computing
power constraints, it's expected to be more than a decade before this
type of encryption can be easily overcome.
Google, one of the leaders in the effort, announced in May that it would switch over to 2,048-bit encryption keys by the end of 2013. Yahoo recently confirmed to Bloomberg,
which spoke with several tech companies that are investing in new
encryption, that it will make 2048-bit encryption standard by January
2014 for all its Mail users. Facebook also plans to move to 2048-bit
encryption, a spokeswoman told Bloomberg, and will roll out "perfect
forward secrecy," a feature that prevents snoopers from accessing user
data even if they can access the company's security codes.
...........
His business suffered in the wake of the NSA leaks scandal because
the service he provided was used by the person now most wanted in the US
- Edward Snowden. SophieCo is talking to Ladar Levison, founder and
owner of encrypted email service Lavabit.com, who says all he cares for
is the privacy and the trust of his clients.
FULL SCRIPT: http://on.rt.com/a0w0ru
RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air
The NSA's huge Utah data center is supposed to help U.S. intelligence collect billions of bytes of
data when it opens this fall. But the agency hit a snag or two in
trying to take the complex live: a mysterious, repeated electrical
failure keeps melting the facility's equipment. The center, located in
Utah in part because of a need to access the massive amounts of cheap
electricity available there, has suffered 10 meltdowns over 13 months,
starting in August 2012. Each incident created about $100,000 dollars in
damage.
And according to the Wall Street Journalreport on the facility, those problems could have a lot to do with the contractors (a running theme) tasked with building it. The Journal,
using documents and interviews, outlines the delays and problems
encountered by the agency in its completion of the mostly classified
complex. Speaking to an official, the paper notes that the electrical
problems plaguing the facility are like "a flash of lightning inside a
2-foot box." And those flashes, they continue, "create fiery explosions,
melt metal and cause circuits to fail." So, why is it happening? It
could be because of some cut corners in the design and construction of
its electrical system:
The NSA's Hugely Expensive Utah Data Center Has Major Electrical Problems And Basically Isn't Working
The NSA data center in Utah may have had to use this plan thanks to electrical concerns
Well,
this is good news for those with privacy concerns about the NSA and
terrible news for those concerned about government spending. The
National Security Agency’s new billion-dollar-plus data center in
Bluffdale, Utah was supposed to go online in September, but the Wall
Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman reports that it has major electrical problems and that the facility known as “the country’s biggest spy center” is presently nearly unusable:
Chronic
electrical surges at the massive new data-storage facility central to
the National Security Agency’s spying operation have destroyed hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center’s
opening for a year, according to project documents and current and
former officials.
There have been 10 meltdowns in the past 13
months that have prevented the NSA from using computers at its new Utah
data-storage center, slated to be the spy agency’s largest, according to
project documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Glenn
Greenwald isn’t the only one dropping explosive material on the NSA.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the data center’s electrical
problems include “arc failures,” a.k.a. “a flash of lightning inside a
2-foot box,” which results in fiery explosions, melted metal and circuit
failure. More terrifying, this has happened ten times, most recently on
September 25, reports the WSJ, which reviewed project documents and
reports and talked to contractors involved. The report blames the NSA
“fast tracking” the Utah project and thus bypassing “regular quality
controls in design and construction.” Whoops.
Re/code
