Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers
By STEPHANIE STROM | New York Times | March 17, 2010
To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.
The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.
WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on Monday.
Lt. Col. Lee Packnett, an Army spokesman, confirmed that the report was real. Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, said the concerns the report raised were hypothetical.
“It did not point to anything that has actually happened as a result of the release,” Mr. Assange said. “It contains the analyst’s best guesses as to how the information could be used to harm the Army but no concrete examples of any real harm being done.”
WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization, has rankled governments and companies around the world with its publication of materials intended to be kept secret. For instance, the Army’s report says that in 2008, access to the Web site in the United States was cut off by court order after Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss financial institution, sued it for publishing documents implicating Baer in money laundering, grand larceny and tax evasion. Access was restored after two weeks, when the bank dropped its case.
Governments, including those of North Korea and Thailand, also have tried to prevent access to the site and complained about its release of materials critical of their governments and policies.
The Army’s interest in WikiLeaks appears to have been spurred by, among other things, its publication and analysis of classified and unclassified Army documents containing information about military equipment, units, operations and “nearly the entire order of battle” for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in April 2007.
WikiLeaks also published an outdated, unclassified copy of the “standard operating procedures” at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. WikiLeaks said the document revealed methods by which the military prevented prisoners from meeting with the International Red Cross and the use of “extreme psychological stress” as a means of torture.
The Army’s report on WikiLeaks does not say whether WikiLeaks’ analysis of that document was accurate. It does charge that some of WikiLeaks’s other interpretation of information is flawed but does not say specifically in what way.
The report also airs the Pentagon’s concern over some 2,000 pages of documents WikiLeaks released on equipment used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon concluded that such information could be used by foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups and others to identify vulnerabilities, plan attacks and build new devices.
WikiLeaks, which won Amnesty International’s new media award in 2009, almost closed this year because it was broke and still operates at less than its full capacity. It relies on donations from humans rights groups, journalists, technology buffs and individuals, and Mr. Assange said it had raised just two-thirds of the $600,000 needed for its budget this year and thus was not publishing everything it had.
Perhaps the most amusing aspect of the Army’s report, to Mr. Assange, was its speculation that WikiLeaks is supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. “I only wish they would step forward with a check if that’s the case,” he said.
AP photojournalist injured in Hebron
Ma’an – 18/03/2010
Hebron – An photojournalist sustained injuries to his back after being struck by a tear-gas canister on Wednesday during clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces.
Nasser Shiyoukhi, a photographer for The Associated Press, was critically injured, witnesses said. A Palestine Red Crescent ambulance reportedly transferred the journalist to a nearby hospital, although it was not immediately clear which one.
Shiyoukhi was among several photojournalists covering ongoing confrontations around the Tarek Bin Ziab street in southern Hebron when he was struck by the projectile.
An Israeli military spokesman told Ma’an that a photojournalist was lightly injured during a riot. Palestinians in the area hurled rocks at Israeli forces, who responded with riot dispersal means, the spokesman said. He added that, in the Israeli army’s view, all journalists and others covering violent events do so at their own risk.
Shiyoukhi was arrested near the Ibrahimi Mosque in late February over allegations he assaulted a settler in Hebron two months earlier, a move that drew the ire of local media advocates.
The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) strongly condemned what it termed Israeli attacks against a group of journalists in the West Bank and Jerusalem in recent days.
EFF Posts Documents Detailing U.S. Law Enforcement Collection of Data From Social Media Sites
By Marcia Hofman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | March 17, 2010
EFF has posted documents shedding light on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gather information in investigations. The records, obtained from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division, are the first in a series of documents that will be released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that EFF filed with the help of the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic.
One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools — including social networking sites and Google Street View — to investigate taxpayers.
The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information. The good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents on social networking sites in response to EFF’s request suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of these websites.
The documents released by the IRS also include excerpts from the Internal Revenue Manual explaining that employees aren’t allowed to use government computers to access social networking sites for personal communication, and cautioning them to be careful to avoid any appearance that they’re speaking on behalf of the IRS when making personal use of social media.
The Justice Department released a presentation entitled “Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites.” The slides, which were prepared by two lawyers from the agency’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, detail several social media companies’ data retention practices and responses to law enforcement requests. The presentation notes that Facebook was “often cooperative with emergency requests” while complaining about Twitter’s short data retention policies and refusal to preserve data without legal process. The presentation also touches on use of social media for undercover operations.
Over the next few months, EFF will be getting more documents from several law enforcement and intelligence agencies concerning their use of social networking sites for investigative purposes. We’ll post those files here as they arrive.
NZ internet filter goes live – government forgets to tell public
The rise of the secret censor
By John Ozimek | The Register | 12th March 2010
New Zealand’s internet filtering system went live last month – but the government forgot to mention this to its electorate until its hand was forced by online freedom campaign, Tech Liberty.
Thomas Beagle, a spokesman for the group, said he was “very disappointed that the filter is now running” and that its launch had been conducted in such a “stealthy mode”. He added: “It’s a sad day for the New Zealand internet.”
In an interview with Computerworld this week, he claimed that the filter had gone live on February 1 but the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) delayed announcing this at until it had met with its Independent Reference Group.
The manager of the DIA’s Censorship Compliance Unit, Steve O’Brien, denied that there had been any subterfuge. The system has been undergoing trials for two years and the media have been aware of this throughout.
He said: “The Independent Reference Group has met and the filter system processes were demonstrated as set out in the code of practice, that is that the website filtering system prevents access to known websites containing images of child sexual abuse.”
While the DIA continues to be coy about exactly which ISPs are joining the filter, Tech Liberty understands that Watchdog and MaxNet have already signed-up to deploy the filter system, and that ISPs Telstra Clear, Telecom and Vodafone have said they will do so.
Orcon, Slingshot and Natcom have said that they won’t or, in the case of Orcon, that more data is needed as to how the filter will impact customer service.
ISPs also appear to take differing views of what – and when – to tell their customers. Maxnet appear not to have warned their customers officially that the filter is in place: Vodafone has said it will do so when it goes live.
The system employs the Swedish Netclean Whitebox content filter – website requests are filtered by Border Gateway Protocol against a blacklist held on a central server in the government Censorship Compliance Unit. The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which actively reviews banned URLs each month to eliminate false positives.
Bans must be justified and signed off by three “warranted inspectors of publications”. Government statistics, published in 2009, suggest that the blacklist includes more than 7,000 URLs featuring child sexual abuse – or over ten times the number of links recognised by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation. It has been built by the censorship unit since 2005 and is affiliated with Europe’s Cospol Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project.
David Zanetti, technical spokesperson for Tech Liberty, said: “We fear that the filter will reduce the stability of the internet in New Zealand. It is a single point of failure, introduces a new and very tempting target for hackers, and by diverting traffic will cause issues with modern internet applications.”
Tech Liberty is also concerned by the expansion of government powers that thefilter represents. It entrenches the principle that the government can set up a new censorship scheme and block material with no reference to existing law. Worse, the filter list stays secret, in contrast to the censorship regime that operates in respect of other media, where the Chief Censor must publish decisions banning offensive material.
Cynics have also noted that the launch of the filter comes not long before the eighth round of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations, due to take place in Wellington, New Zealand in April. ®
The Beginning of the End of Data Retention
By Eddan Katz | Electronic Frontier Foundation | March 10, 2010
Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers’ activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.
The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. The charge was led by the German Working Group on Data Retention (AK Vorrat), which in 2007 filed a class-action lawsuit of nearly 35,000 people challenging the German law.
The suit’s complaints were mostly upheld by last week’s German Constitutional Court decision. The court held that the blanket data retention mandated by the EU directive violated Article 10 of the German Constitution, which guarantees the basic right to private life and correspondence. The Court said that an infrastructure of exploratory surveillance results in an exceptional intensity of interference with human rights, which must be proportionately protected with appropriate safeguards. It also significantly narrowed the options for similar EU retention laws on other types of data. The court ordered the immediate deletion of all the data stored since the law went into effect in 2008 and ordered the suspension of data collection until a revised national law is proposed.
However, the court did choose to leave many important questions about the EU directive unanswered. In highlighting the need for increased safeguards, the court failed to recognize that the storage of data itself is what violates human rights. For instance, a survey of German citizens in 2008 found that 1 in 2 people would not have conversations with counselors or therapists by phone or email because of their concern about data retention.
A bolder stance was taken in October 2009 by the Romanian Constitutional Court, which ruled that the EU directive fundamentally violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private life and correspondence. Data retention itself, the court wrote, is “likely to overturn the presumption of innocence and to transform a priori all users of electronic communication services or public communication networks into people suspected of committing terrorism crimes or other serious crimes.” As a result, all citizens would become “permanent subjects to this intrusion into their exercise of their private rights to correspondence and freedom of expression.”
The rulings in Romania and now Germany set the stage for an imminent series of decisions on the status of national data retention laws across Europe. The recent Bulgarian vote on data retention legislation met with sharp criticism and protests. Petitions against the Belgian data retention law are available in both French and Flemish. The constitutional challenge against the Retention of Data Bill brought by Digital Rights Ireland may be referred to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, despite the fact that the European Commission won its lawsuit against the government of Sweden for failing to implement the directive, the minimal penalty turns out to be worth the political risk.
In order to overturn a directive, the European Commission, Parliament, and Council have to agree. Viviane Reding, the incoming European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, declared at her confirmation hearings her dedication to defending the right to privacy. The members of the European Parliament, inaugurating their new term, flexed their political muscle when they recently rejected assenting to the SWIFT agreement that would have enabled the wholesale transfer of Europeans’ financial data to the US. The European Council, representing the ministries of the individual Member States, will respond to the political climate in their home countries.
All in all, the threats to privacy and free speech posed by the Data Retention Directive are on their way to being nullified. In Germany, AK Vorrat launched its campaign against the new law being devised and set its sights on ending data retention on the European level. They will need the help of citizens across Europe to raise awareness and speak out for their rights on national levels.
Freedom Not Fear is planning another series of protests later this year – stay tuned to Deeplinks or sign up for FNF’s mailing list to find out what is being planned near you.
CIA tainted French bread with LSD for test
Press TV – March 11, 2010
After 50 years of suspicions over the cursed bread of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit and its people’s hallucinations, a journalist found CIA in the background of the tragedy.
In summer 1951, the whole quiet village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously affected by psychosis and hallucinations among its residents.
The out break of acute psychotic episodes and various physical symptoms killed at least seven residents, and admitted about 50 to asylums. The mysterious incident left hundreds of people afflicted.
Hank Albarelli, an investigative journalist, has claimed hallucination occurred for a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
He traced the alimentary intoxication to cursed bread. Albarelli discovered the US had poisoned the bread with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) as part of a secret experiment.
The journalist came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for SOD. He fell from a 13th floor window two years after the cursed bread incident.
Albarelli published the result of his investigations in a book titled A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments in 2009.
Upset by U.S. Security, Pakistanis Return as Heroes
By JANE PERLEZ | New York Times | March 9, 2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.
“People should be thankful, you made them so proud,” said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, during an interview in his studio on Tuesday with four of the six politicians, who railed against the security precautions at Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Meetings with the Obama administration’s top policy makers on Pakistan, including the president’s special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, and visits to the Pentagon and the National Security Council, did not allay the anger the politicians said they felt at being asked to submit to a secondary screening on Sunday before boarding a flight to New Orleans. They declined to be screened and did not board the flight.
Pakistan is one of 14 mostly Muslim countries whose citizens must go through increased checks before they fly into the United States, a procedure mandated by the Obama administration in the wake of the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up an airliner flying from the Netherlands to Detroit on Dec. 25.
The inclusion of Pakistan on the list was broadly criticized as an insult to a country that the United States calls an ally.
The leader of the parliamentary group, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, said in an interview on Tuesday that before they were to board the flight for New Orleans, he and his colleagues were selected from a crowd of passengers at the airport and asked to stand aside.
They were then asked to accept a full-body scan by a machine, he said. Such body-scanning units are in use at 19 airports across the United States, and more are being installed.
One of Mr. Afridi’s colleagues, Akhunzada Chitan, told Mr. Mir on his “Capital Talk” program, “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”
The lawmakers were chosen to visit the United States by the Political Section of the American Embassy. American officials are eager to reach out to political figures from the underdeveloped and isolated tribal areas where the Pakistani Army is now fighting to reclaim territory from the Taliban.
The United States Agency for International Development pledged two years ago to spend $750 million on various projects in the tribal areas, but residents there complain that they see more of the Taliban than American assistance.
In preparatory briefings for their trip, the politicians were advised that they might have to submit to extra body searches, just as randomly selected Americans must submit to secondary screening by the new machines, two officials from the American Embassy said.
The Pakistanis were specifically warned that the United States was not a “V.I.P. culture,” unlike Pakistan, where politicians are often exempted from unpalatable procedures that other people have to tolerate, the American officials said.
“We are disappointed that the group took offense at the security procedures thousands of Americans and visitors must endure at airports every day,” said Larry Schwartz, the senior communications adviser at the American Embassy in Islamabad. “No offense was intended. Indeed, they were warmly welcomed at high levels in Washington.”
The American Embassy in Islamabad has been endowed with an extra $37 million by Congress to spend on exchange programs intended to show skeptical Pakistanis that the United States is a real ally, a country that wants to help, not hinder, Pakistan.
The people-to-people exchanges between Pakistan and the United States, which include American lecturers and teachers of English coming to Pakistan, is now the most ambitious of such efforts run by the State Department around the globe, Mr. Schwartz said.
About 2,000 Pakistanis are expected to participate in the strengthened educational and cultural programs this year, he said. Indeed, a prime motivation of the protest against the screening procedures by the tribal area politicians appeared to be an effort to appeal to their home constituencies, many of whom regard the United States as an enemy.
“Our people were very disturbed we were going to America,” Mr. Afridi said. “We were under threat for going to the United States. We took the risk to see if America was interested in solving the problems.”
The State Department paid each of the participants $200 a day for accommodations and food during their stay in the United States.
If the American taxpayers wanted the money for the expenses refunded, he would be happy to do so, said Mr. Afridi, 40, who described himself as a major trader in cement, with businesses across Pakistan and in Afghanistan.
“We can pay back the $200 a day, no problem,” he said.
Then, he drove off in his brand-new Hummer — an example of his affection for American autos, he said — to appear on another television program to tell his story of standing up to the American authorities.
Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting.
UK: Government attempts to keep torture case secret
Afua Hirsch | The Guardian | March 8, 2010
The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law.
This morning a case will come before three appeal judges in London in which seven men are seeking damages against the government for mistreatment during what they say was their “extraordinary rendition” and torture facilitated by the British security services.
The men include former Guantánamo Bay detainees Binyam Mohamed and Moazzam Begg. But the government is seeking to have the case held in secret, less than two weeks after the court of appeal ruled that seven paragraphs of secret evidence in the case of Mohamed should be made public.
Lawyers for the men say that if successful, the government’s application would extend closed proceedings into findings of fact in the civil courts for the first time.
“This would set a very serious precedent,” said Louise Christian, a partner at Christian Khan who represents Martin Mubanga, one of the claimants, who was also detained at Guantánamo Bay. “If you allow evidence in ordinary civil cases to be kept secret, there is no doubt it will be endlessly used by the government. As the Binyam Mohamed case illustrated, this is really about the government avoiding embarrassment for the reality of their collaboration with the US and all that happened, rather than any real national security issues.”
The claimants have never been charged with an offence and are pursuing a claim for a range of civil wrongs including torture, false imprisonment and misfeasance in public office.
Last month the court of appeal heavily criticised the security services in a ruling in Mohamed’s case. Publicising their judgment after an attempt by government lawyers to have damaging remarks about the security services edited out, three of England’s most senior judges said British agents “appear to have a dubious record when it comes to human rights and coercive techniques”.
The government responded furiously to the comments, and to the court’s decision to release the seven paragraphs, which it said had damaged intelligence-sharing with the US.
But today lawyers for the men bringing the civil claim will argue that the attempt to hold an entire damages case in secret goes far beyond any previous rulings. The government applied to have the case heard behind closed doors last July, when lawyers for government bodies including MI6 the Secret Intelligence Service, the Foreign Office and the attorney-general, argued that more than 250,000 documents would have to be provided, more than half of which were marked “secret”, and disclosure would take up to 10 years.
If successful, the application could open the way for a range of civil claims to be held in private using a system of “special advocates” – specially vetted lawyers appointed by the court – who would not be able to discuss the case with clients.
“This would have serious implications for other actions against the state, such as civil actions against the police or immigration services where they are accused of breaches of human rights or unlawful detention, actions against police usually about assault and imprisonment,” said Christian. Experts are describing the attempt as a challenge to open justice – a central principle of English law strengthened by the European convention on human rights, and to the adversarial nature of English trials, which dates back to at least the 13th century.
The claimants will argue that such changes would have to be approved by parliament, with strong safeguards in place.
Lawyers also say the case would have drastic implications for the rest of the UK’s legal system, creating “severe practical difficulties,” because they would be unable to advise clients or reach settlements out of court. Concerns have also been raised that English common law – which depends on precedents from previous cases being followed by lawyers and judges – will be unable to develop if hearings and judgments are kept secret.
Last November the high court judge Mr Justice Silber said the government could have the case heard in secret, stating that the court had the power to order a closed hearing because of the scale and complexity of the case, and the “high proportion of very sensitive material”.
The government will defend that decision today, and denies that the attempt to have the case heard in secret was part of a cover-up. “The government is not seeking to cover up information or relevant material in these cases. Quite the opposite,” a Foreign Office spokesperson said. “We applied for a closed procedure so that the court will be able to fully consider the large volume of relevant material already identified that cannot be disclosed openly without a real risk of causing substantial harm or real damage to the public interest.”
But today lawyers for the men bringing the claim will argue that Silber’s judgment was “founded on a misunderstanding”.”Allegations of collusion in torture and extraordinary rendition are some of the most serious that could possibly come before a court and the government,” Christian said. “The court is very aware of the tactics in trying to avoid proper disclosure in these sorts of claims.”
US to share domestic civil aviation information with Israel
Palestine Information Center | March 5, 2010
WASHINGTON — US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz on Tuesday announced a new agreement to enhance information sharing about civil aviation security incidents.
“The real-time exchange of information with our international partners is critical to our efforts to enhance overall global aviation security,” said Napolitano. “This agreement will allow the United States and Israel to better coordinate on, and respond to potential aviation security incidents to strengthen our mutual safety.”
Katz said the new agreement will “further improve the effectiveness of the cooperation between the respective civil aviation security authorities.”
Human rights groups are concerned that such an agreement will give the Israeli occupation a wealth of information about passengers traveling by air, including Arab and Palestinian persons.
Just over a month ago, Israeli mossad agents used European passports to get in Dubai and assassinate a Palestinian resistance leader.
Shock jock Hal Turner takes witness stand
By Mike Kelly | The Record | March 3, 2010
BROOKLYN – Shock jock Hal Turner of North Bergen took the witness stand in his federal trial Wednesday and accused the FBI of urging him to make violent statements as a way of infiltrating extremist right-wing groups.
Turner, who built an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with his radio show, is on trial here on a single charge of threatening three Chicago-based federal appeals court judges. The charge is based on a posting Turner made on his radio network blog last June in which he said the judges “deserved to be killed” for their ruling in a gun control case.
If convicted, he faces 10 years in prison.
In an investigative report last November, based on FBI documents, The Record outlined Turner’s secret FBI role in infiltrating the same groups who were drawn to his radio show and blog. Besides neo-Nazis, Turner said he made contact with the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation.
In more than two hours of testimony before lunch, Turner described how he was recruited in 2003 by the FBI’s Newark-based Joint Terrorism Task Force. He said he was paid “in excess of $100,000” by the FBI during his almost five years as an informant.
After the husband and mother of Chicago-based U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lefkow were murdered in 2005, Turner said the FBI asked him to “ratchet up the rhetoric” on his radio show in an attempt to “flush out” the killer. As it turned out, Lefkow’s husband and mother were not murdered by right-wing extremists but by a man who was disgruntled with one of her rulings.
Turner’s testimony, which is expected to continue all day, marked a dramatic turnabout in the trial.
In gripping testimony on Tuesday, all three Chicago appellate court judges took the stand and said they felt threatened by Turner’s blog posting that they “deserved to be killed.”
During the first two days of the trial, while prosecutors presented their side of the case, there was no mention of Turner’s FBI link. Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Walter did not even permit defense attorneys to present an opening statement until after prosecutors had finished introducing evidence and rested their case.
“Here’s where the case get’s very interesting,” said Turner’s lead defense attorney, Michael Orozco, in his opening statement before calling Turner as his first witness.
UK: Open Wi-Fi ‘outlawed’ by Digital Economy Bill
By David Meyer | ZDNet UK | February 26, 2010
The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.
This would leave many organisations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.
Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively “outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses”, and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.
“This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in,” Edwards said.
“Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café.”
In the explanatory document, Lord Young, a minister at BIS, described common classes of public Wi-Fi access, and explained that none of them could be protected. Libraries, he said, could not be exempted because “this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to ‘fake’ organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement”.
Universities cannot be exempted, Young said, because some universities already have stringent anti-file-sharing rules for their networks, and “it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative”.
Subscriber vs IP
Young added that universities will need to figure out for themselves whether they qualify as an ISP or a subscriber. This is a distinction that carries very different implications under the terms of the bill, which would establish possible account suspension as a sanction against subscribers who repeatedly break copyright law, and force ISPs to store user data and hand it over to rights holders when ordered to do so.
Businesses providing open Wi-Fi networks to customers and clients will also need to decide whether they are ISPs or subscribers, “depending on the type of service and the nature of their relationship with their consumers…although it appears unlikely that few other than possibly the large hotel chains or conference centres might be ISPs”, Young said.
Young added that free or ‘coffee shop’ access tends to be too low-bandwidth to support file-sharing and, under the bill, “such a service is more likely to receive notification letters as a subscriber than as an ISP”. He recommended that they secure their connections and install privacy controls, to “reduce the possibility of infringement with any cases on appeal being considered on their merits”.
The BIS minister also noted that there was scope in the bill’s text — currently being amended in the House of Lords — “to reflect the position of libraries, universities or Wi-Fi providers”, perhaps by letting such organisations have different sets of thresholds that would trigger notification letters from rights holders.
“This would be a matter for the code and we would urge the relevant representative bodies to consider now how best to engage in the [Digital Economy Bill] code development process,” he added.
The bill defines an ‘internet access service’ as an electronic communications service that “is provided to a subscriber, consists entirely or mainly of the provision of access to the internet, and includes the allocation of an IP address or IP addresses to the subscriber to enable that access”.
An ISP is defined as a person who provides an internet access service, and a subscriber is defined as a person who “receives the service under an agreement between the person and the provider of the service, and does not receive it as a communications provider”.
Referring to BIS’s comments about the low bandwidth of coffee-shop connections, Lilian Edwards suggested it was “not correct to draft laws hoping they are difficult to break”.
Edwards also pointed out that BIS’s guidance for universities shows the government admitting “they don’t know themselves how universities fit into the Digital Economy Bill”.
“[Universities] don’t know if they’re subscribers, ISPs or neither,” Edwards said. “If the government is not clear, how on earth are the universities supposed to respond? This seems almost unprecedented to me, for a government document.”
Germany’s Top Court Overturns Anti-Terrorism Data Law
By Patrick Donahue – March 2, 2010
Bloomberg — Germany’s highest court overturned a two-year-old anti-terrorism law that requires telecommunications providers such as Deutsche Telekom AG to store Internet and phone data for six months, saying the rules violate privacy.
The law, which came into effect in December 2007 during Chancellor Angela Merkel’s previous government, calls for phone companies to collect data on phone calls, Internet surfing and text messaging for potential use in criminal or terrorist investigations.
The Federal Constitutional Court found that while the storing of communications data isn’t automatically unconstitutional, the law doesn’t sufficiently clarify what the information will be used for or provide for transparency.
The data “must be deleted immediately,” Hans-Juergen Papier, the court’s president, said today as he read out the decision in the western city of Karlsruhe.
Merkel’s government passed the law as part of its efforts to fight crime and terrorism, implementing a European Union directive adopted after the March 2004 bomb attack on Spanish trains that killed 191 people. While prosecutors had access to the data, the law provided limits against storing conversation details or identifying specific Web sites.
Privacy advocates challenged the legislation soon after it came into effect. Some 35,000 complaints were filed to the court, the most in its history, Deutsche Presse-Agentur said.
Strictest Standards
“This blanket data saving must conform to the very strictest constitutional standards in order to be effective,” Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told reporters in Berlin. “This is a day to be very happy.”
The court said collected information can only be made available through a court warrant. Investigators also must be limited to use such data to pursue a proven “concrete danger” directed against a person or the security of the state. The data can also be used to prevent a “communal danger.”
The judges in Karlsruhe also said service providers should not be allowed to have “uncontrolled” discretion over how information is stored and secured.
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of the Free Democratic Party, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner, declined to say when the government would begin drafting a new data-storage law.
–Editors: Alan Crawford, Leon Mangasarian
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net
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Hospital Horror
Documented in the film,“Bad Medicine”
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Araghchi: Failure to punish aggressors against Iran endangers all nations
- Iran tells UN Security Council to stop reversing roles of ‘aggressor and victim’
- Disgraced neocons Feith & Libby: stop whining about ‘endless war’
- CENTCOM rejects Israeli claims of preparations for new Iran attacks
- Your Shopping Bag Runs Through Hormuz
- Armando Mema: Finland Used as New Frontline Against Russia
- Gestapo 2.0? Germany grants spy agencies sweeping new powers
- Franco-Palestinian group seeks court ban on Israeli real estate fair in Paris
- How British foreign policy is frozen in the ruins of empire
- EU risks investor exodus over Russian assets – Euroclear chief
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Barents Sea Temperatures Were Warmer And Sea Ice Less Extensive In The 1700s Than Today
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
