Global minilinks

Posted by Danny O'Brien

What caught our eye among the world's digital rights news this week:

• Blogger's Rights in Morocco
  Fouad Mourtada is the net user tortured and sentenced to three years jail for putting up a joke Facebook entry of a Moroccan prince. Join the protests on 2PM Saturday in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Montreal, and Madrid.
  
• Lobby Groups Oppose Plans for EU Copyright Extension
  Wikinews interviews EFF's European team, and ORG's Becky Hogge about plans to extend copyright in Europe.
  
• ISP Voluntary / Mandatory Filtering
  Comprehensive list of state-determined censorship systems in the West, by country.
  
• UK Filesharing Law 'Unworkable'
  Experts say human rights, privacy laws and technical hurdles stand against the UK government's plans to force ISPs to spy on their customers for rightsholders.
  
• Australian Judge: Code Trumps Law
  Not if you craft law to work with the realities of code.
  
• Europe Spies on Itself
  A round-up across Europe of how governments spy on their own citizens.
  
• IP Rights in Kosovo
  With independence, comes new IP law: you have until September to re-register your Serbian IP rights in the breakaway state.
  
• End User Licenses Don't End Up Fair
  In the UK, consumer groups are reporting software companies for "obscure, unbalanced and unfair" clauses in their EULAs.
  
• EU Privacy Watchdogs: Search Engines Must Obey EU Rules
  Search engines like Google are in the regulator's crosshairs for flouting Europe's privacy laws.
  
• ISP Filtering Trials Start in Australia
  Technical trials begin for indecency-related filters at the ISP level in Australia. Will privacy and security issues be part of the trial? How about the costs of scaling for new ISP entrants?
  
• World Wide Social Networking
  Which countries use which social networking sites.
  

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Anonymous GOP Operatives Surprised that Fearmongering Isn't Working

Posted by Tim Jones

Deceptive exploitation of Americans' fears of terrorism has been a central weapon in the GOP's campaign to prevent phone companies from being held accountable for lawbreaking. Two weeks ago, EFF looked at the evidence and concluded that this strategy would fail to sway voters.

Today, events have borne that prediction out. From the subscription-only Congress Daily newsletter:

House Republican attempts to gain political traction against Democrats on the delayed overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act aren't having the impact GOP operatives had hoped for. Despite past political success pushing it as a national security issue, Republican and Democratic lawmakers and senior aides said privately they are surprised by the limited response. "It's almost got no traction," said one surprised senior aide to a Democratic lawmaker. The chief of staff to a southern Republican added: "We're not hearing much of anything on FISA. Clearly it is something folks have concerns about, but I thought it would have been a bit louder."

The strategy hasn't just failed — it may even be backfiring. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire opposes immunity and was a target of the attack ads. According to Congress Daily, 'Shea-Porter said such attacks have resulted in hundreds of phone calls, but she dismissed them as a problem. "Once we explained to people that FISA is in effect, they got upset that they had been misled," she said.'

While these ads won't sway voters, it's less certain whether they'll sway Congresspeople. Many of the targeted Representatives have kept quiet so far. But many have responded brilliantly.

Here's Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas:

"The White House is trying to scare Americans to give total control to one branch of government," Boyda said in an interview from Washington. "The Republicans don't have the guts to stand up to the president. They're afraid of some 30-second ad that could be run against them."

Here's Rep. Tim Mahoney of Florida:

When I got elected," Rep. Mahoney said last week, "I took an oath to defend the Constitution. If some of these companies gave information to the government without the government getting a warrant, that was unconstitutional.

"You know what (the companies) said? They said I should vote for the immunity because it's patriotic. That's how weak the argument is."

Rep. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Rep. Mike Arcuri of NY have also made strong and smart statements.

Whoever your Representative is, it always helps to phone or email them and tell them where you stand!

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Stop Copyright Term Extension in Europe!

Posted by Danny O'Brien

Charlie McCreevy, the EU's Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, wants to nearly double the European copyright term in sound recordings - from 50 years to an astounding 95. Join us and stop overextending copyright.

If you read Commissioner McCreevy's declaration this month to bring American-style copyright terms for sound recordings to the EU, one might have thought that it was all a done deal. He gave the impression that he had consulted with everybody who counted in the matter, balanced all the arguments, and had all the powerful players on his side.

We don't think he has. McCreevy still has to persuade his fellow Commissioners and the European Parliament before sound recordings are locked away in Europe for another 45 years. And while the record labels support the government stretching their contracts far into the future, the facts stand against term extension. Impartial studies, copyright scholars, and some of the world's most respected economists all say that longer terms mean little new wealth for performers, yet create all the disadvantages of a creative world depleted of its valuable long-promised public domain.

And it's not true that McCreevy and the Commission have heard from all the key figures. They have yet to hear from you.

To help the EU's decisionmakers understand how bad an idea for innovation and the future copyright term extension is, EFF has joined forces with Britain's Open Rights Group to launch a grassroots-led campaign against McCreevy's plans.

Visit Sound Copyright now to learn more (in English, French or German), and add your voice.

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EFF to FCC: "Reasonable Network Management" Requires Transparency

Posted by Fred von Lohmann

In response to the FCC's inquiry into Comcast's interference with BitTorrent traffic, EFF filed comments yesterday urging the FCC to make it clear that ISPs must, at a minimum, adequately disclose their "network management" practices before they can hide behind the excuse of "reasonable network management."

The FCC has invited public comments regarding the Comcast BitTorrent blocking affair in response to two petitions: one filed by Vuze (formerly Azureus) and another filed by the Media Access Project, FreePress and Public Knowledge. (The recent public hearing in Boston, in which Comcast paid people to fill seats, was also part of this same proceeding.)

The central question in the proceeding is whether Comcast has violated the four neutrality principles set out in the FCC's Internet Policy Statement. It seems clear that Comcast's protocol-specific interference with BitTorrent traffic violates those neutrality principles. In response, Comcast (and other ISPs) have offered the excuse that it was all "reasonable network management" -- a catch-all exception to the FCC's neutrality principles.

In its comments to the FCC, EFF urges the agency to clarify that the "reasonable network management" exception to its neutrality principles should only apply where an ISP has adequately disclosed the existence and likely consequence to customers of its discriminatory practices. After all, if we believe that market forces are our first line of defense against unreasonable ISP behavior, those forces can only work if customers, competitors, innovators, and policy-makers know what the ISPs are up to. On that score, Comcast has obviously fallen short, issuing a series of denials, evasions, and half-truths for 10 months after its own customers caught them interfering with BitTorrent traffic. The FCC needs to send a message to Comcast and other ISPs that this is unacceptable.

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The Telecom Immunity Battle on YouTube

Posted by Richard Esguerra

Last week, proponents of telecom immunity spent loads of money on a slick, partisan, fear-mongering, television attack ad that is flat out wrong about the Protect America Act and severely misleading on all other counts. The video is on YouTube, but the built-in comment and voting system have been disabled by the ad's sponsor, "Defense of Democracies." (Note to Defense of Democracies: eliminating free debate and voting is not a good way to defend a democracy.)

According to an article by FactCheck.org in Newsweek: "The group also declined to provide a list of lawmakers being targeted by the ad, but we've learned that they include [a number of Democratic representatives], all of them first-term lawmakers who may be vulnerable in their reelection bids." The partisanship is desperately vicious, and the sponsor should have recognized that attack ads like this utterly backfired in the 2006 election.

In contrast, defenders of civil liberties simply gave regular people a platform to speak for themselves, then posted the results to YouTube:

The House and Senate are still negotiating over the terms of the final surveillance bill -- take action to keep lawmakers from granting immunity for lawbreaking telecoms!

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Comcast Caught Again

Posted by Hugh D'Andrade

Comcast has a habit of blocking things it doesn’t like. First it was caught red-handed blocking P2P traffic on its networks. Now, Comcast has admitted to paying supporters to pack a public hearing in Massachusetts – a likely attempt to block the public from voicing concerns about their P2P policies.

The Register has a great quote from Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas:

As is common practice in Washington, we did pay a few people to stand in line [outside the meeting hall] and then hold seats for some of our Comcast executives and other Comcast employees who were attending. We were just trying to make sure the hearing was well-attended on our side.

Apparently Comcast’s opposition to open networks extends to an opposition to open debate as well. The cable giant wasn’t upfront with the public and its customers about its network policies – and now they have been caught once more with a deceptive public relations strategy.

But the news only got worse for Comcast this week, with reports that New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has subpoenaed records looking into Comcast’s handling of P2P sharing on its networks. And it looks like the FCC is considering scheduling another hearing to allow all sides to be heard on this issue — this one to be held in Stanford, home to some of the loudest supporters of network neutrality in the country.

There is a way for Comcast to wake up from the PR nightmare it finds itself in -- it can start being upfront with the public, and support open debate on Internet policy.

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A New Digital Right?

Posted by Danny O'Brien

The German Constitutional Court (the Bundesverfassungsgericht) ruled today on a what the German press is calling "a new basic right" - one that guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of computer systems.

The court spelled out the protection as part of its judgement (available in German) on the constitutionality of a law that let police infiltrate a suspect's computer by using trojan horses or rootkits. Such police powers had been repeatedly called for by the Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, as well as the head of the German Federal Police.

The first implementation of the law by the Federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen was struck down by the court, who said that such invasions of computer systems clashed with the "general personality right" - a right the court had previously derived from the Constitution's basic right to human dignity and personal freedom.

It's easy to see this as a new right in itself - but perhaps it is better to understand it, as the court did, in terms of a reasonable (and perhaps overdue) updating of the language of traditional human liberties.

Just as EFF has argued that the United States' Constitution's wording against warrantless searches should protect the privacy of the contents of your computer and email as strongly as it does the privacy of real world "papers and effects", so the German constitutional court said that the 1949 constitution protects the digital contents of a PC or laptop (or any other "informationstechnischer Systeme") against secret surveillance as tightly as your possessions in the real world. A virtual trojan horse is as uncivilized a tool of the police as sneaking an officer into your own home.

As with an earlier decision on wiretapping, the court also held that the essential core of private life must never be surveilled by the state: the act of practicing a religion, say, or conversation between family members.

Germany, a country with a proud (and hard-learned) modern tradition of protecting the privacy of its citizens, now has some interesting new legal territory to explore. On the modern Internet, the core of citizen's private life is increasingly distributed among many different computers. A conversation between family members can take place on Facebook (or StudiVZ, its German equivalent); the private contents of your home PC may be backed up on an online storage service.

German law enforcement will have to tread carefully not to violate its citizens' basic rights in a world where even the most private life is remotely accessible and spread far and near. We hope that the techniques they develop will be shared and spread with the rest of the world's law makers and law enforcement community.

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Embedded Video and Your Privacy

Posted by Seth Schoen

We've recently started embedding video from YouTube and elsewhere into Deeplinks and other areas of EFF.org. This posed a challenge: On one hand, embedded video is an important tool that we want to be able to use. But, on the other hand, embedded video has worrisome privacy implications that we thought we should do something about.

All embedded, in-line, or off-site content on the World Wide Web implies some privacy risk because of the way most web browsers work. Whenever you follow a link, or download an embedded or off-site resource, your browser sends a referer header (sic) that tells the web site what web page you came from. And whenever you load any document, your browser may send cookies that show whether you've visited the same site before, and that may even identify you directly. For instance, if you're logged into YouTube and you watch an embedded YouTube video on some other site, YouTube can still recognize you because your browser will still send a personalized YouTube cookie.

This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when — even if you didn't try to play the video. When the video hosting site uses an <IFRAME> tag (an increasingly common technique), your browser will automatically load an entire web page from the hosting site; in the course of displaying that page, your browser might send several dozen cookies to several different entities including portal sites or advertising networks. (Even using software like a Flash blocker won't stop this from happening.)

So, that's the challenge we faced: We want to embed video here in the Deeplinks blog because it's an important way of communicating with our readers. But we've also gone to great lengths to protect our visitors' privacy; we believe that when you visit EFF.org, nobody but you should know about it. (For example, when you use our Google-based site search, EFF proxies the search result to Google with a special CGI script on our server, thus hiding your IP address and your Google cookie, if any, from Google's servers.)

As a compromise, we've developed a script called MyTube to protect your privacy. When we embed a video using MyTube, Deeplinks readers will see only a thumbnail from the embedded video — hosted on EFF's own servers — in their web browsers. MyTube prevents the third-party-hosted video from being loaded until and unless the user clicks to play it. (MyTube is currently implemented as a Drupal module — we'll be open-sourcing the code in Drupal CVS soon, as well as looking for ways to make the functionality available to non-Drupal websites.)

You can see it in action here and here.

This prevents YouTube.com (and other third-party video-hosts) from knowing you've been to EFF.org or reading Deeplinks unless you specifically click to watch the video.

As the web gets smarter and more powerful, a broad range of exciting new tools for enabling collaboration and communication are emerging, of which embedded video is just one. As these capabilities grow, it's important to keep an eye on the unexpected privacy implications. Increasingly often, loading a website or even using a desktop application can send information to multiple third-parties without the user's knowledge or consent. EFF encourages the web community to help us find ways to make these information leaks transparent and controllable for the average user.

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White House Wants Immunity Against State Investigations Too

Posted by Kurt Opsahl

The Bush Administration appears to have forgotten that of the dozens of lawsuits over warrantless surveillance, six of them seek to stop "state officials in Missouri, Maine, New Jersey, Connecticut and Vermont from investigating various telecommunication carriers concerning their alleged disclosure of customer telephone records to the National Security Agency (NSA)."

In its fight against accountability for illegal spying, the Bush Administration has fallen back on a classic logical fallacy, attacking the lawsuits against telecommunications companies by casting aspersions on those arguing the lawsuits. The Administration would like to draw attention away from the telecom lawbreaking, and asks the public to instead focus on "class action trial lawyers," and the possibility that they might get attorneys' fees upon winning (most likely meaning upon a ruling by the Supreme Court that the warrantless surveillance program is illegal and unconstitutional).

The rhetoric is problematic as it is, but utterly fails to account for the State lawsuits. The immunity bill does not merely attempt to immunize telecommunications carriers from class action lawsuits, it also is designed to stop investigations by attorneys general and State public utility commissions.

The sovereign States that form our Union have the right, indeed the duty, to protect their citizens from illegal surveillance. When USA Today revealed that telecommunications companies were providing the telephone records of millions of ordinary customers (yes, people like you) to the federal government, the several States exercised that right by beginning investigations. These investigations are not seeking damages. Rather, the "state cases arise out of attempts by state officials to compel various telecommunication carriers to release information concerning their alleged disclosure of customer telephone records to" the NSA.

Don't let the Administration and the telecoms avoid accountability. Call your Representative today.

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Republican Slips and Stalls

Posted by Hugh D'Andrade

Statements from the White House Press Secretary aren't known for being informative, and they rarely give much away. But yesterday's statement from Dana Perino, aside from its myths and inaccuracies, also included this gem of an admission:

These lawsuits are abusive and, if they are allowed to proceed, would serve only to line the pockets of class-action trial lawyers.

Excuse us if we heard incorrectly, but did the Secretary just admit that the telecoms would lose if the cases against them were "allowed to proceed? In the past, the President and his advisors have claimed that the cases against the telecoms were "frivolous," but now it seems they have some merit after all.

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