In The News: August, 2007
Inside the Terrorist Screening Center
Dina Temple-Raston, NPR
To visit the Terrorist Screening Center, you have to make some promises. The first is not to divulge where the center is — aside from saying it is in a secure location in Northern Virginia. A reporter has never been allowed inside the center, and NPR was not allowed to record the analysts who work there, in case someone said something that was classified...
In 2004, the year the TSC opened its doors, it had some 5,400 hits. This year, the FBI expects to log more than 22,000.
Those kinds of numbers worry civil liberties advocates like David Sobel, the senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The bottom-line problem is the government since 9-11 has gotten into the business of making lists of suspicious people," he says. "This has happened without much discussion of the criteria or how affected people might get some recourse and get their names off if they mistakenly have been put on such a list."
Point, Click . . . Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The EFF obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act revealing the inner workings of the FBI's Digital Collection System Network (DCSNet), a software suite that allows the Bureau to conduct surveillance on a wide variety of digital devices. The documents have helped researchers analyze the security implications of the system.
Legal woes mount for TorrentSpy
Greg Sandoval , CNET News.com
Hollywood has pounded TorrentSpy this past week, winning two important court decisions against the BitTorrent search engine that could hand the movie industry some powerful new tools in its fight against illegal file sharing.
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a proponent of strong privacy laws on the Web, has criticized the court findings and claim they pose serious threats to Internet users...
Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney, said Cooper misread the law.
"Essentially, one can do ongoing surveillance of another party's e-mails without their consent and not violate the law," Bankston said. "Not only does this open the door to privacy abuses in civil cases but it also could lead to abuses by the government...It's an incredibly dangerous decision."
EFF report slams RIAA lawsuit campaign, calls for flat-fee, unlimited P2P
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Four years after the RIAA launched its first lawsuits against individual file-swappers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation takes a look back at the campaign as it has unfolded so far and concludes that "suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma." So what is the answer? According to the EFF's 20-page report on the topic, it's a voluntary collective licensing regime that would let music lovers pay a few bucks a month to legally download (and keep) any songs they want.
Happy Anniversary Pirates: 20,000 Copyright Lawsuits and Counting
David Kravets, Wired News
Four years ago, the recording industry set off a legal firestorm when it sued 261 music file-swappers, a move that has reshaped the peer-to-peer, file-sharing world and revamped pirating technologies.
The legal tempest commenced September 8, 2003. Members of the Recording Industry Association of America have followed with some 20,000 similar lawsuits, legal threats and settlements, according to a report published Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The lawsuits, however, are not working," according to the report by the California privacy group. "Today, downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits."
TorrentSpy shuts doors to America
Cade Metz, Register UK
Unwilling to compromise the privacy of its users, TorrentSpy has shut its doors to American file sharers. The move came just hours before a U.S. judge denied an appeal from the company, insisting - once again - that it turn over server logs detailing user behavior...
TorrentSpy's server logs pass through system memory, but are never permanently recorded. The company argues that saving this data would violate its privacy policy, and when Judge Chooljian's order went public, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a big-name privacy watchdog, launched a defense of its own. "We think it's a very troubling ruling that goes well beyond TorrentSpy," EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann told The Reg. "It potentially allows any company's privacy policy to be re-written by its adversary's lawyers. It's a bad precedent to set."
FBI's Wiretap Network Revealed And Request for Reader Document Analysis
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to Wired News by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
TorrentSpy to MPAA: Log this! Site blocks US searches
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy can use the site no more—at least not for now. TorrentSpy has begun to block all searches by US visitors, instead redirecting search requests to a page with the headline "TorrentSpy Acts to Protect Privacy"...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology both warned that such a decision imposed massive record-keeping burdens on practically any company that uses computers. Not only that, but Internet privacy would essentially be dead if companies were forced to hand over such information to the MPAA, RIAA, or anyone else for that matter. "A court would never think to force a company to record telephone calls, transcribe employee conversations, or log other ephemeral information," EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann said. "There is no reason why the rules should be different simply because a company uses digital technologies."
DVD Dilemma
Vince Vitrano, TMJ (NBC - Milwaukee)
New technology allows you to download your favorite shows... and even copy your movies. The big question: if you use it, are you breaking the law?...
Fred von Lohmann, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the law doesn't make sense. "There is a sense here which it prevents consumers from doing things they otherwise would be entitled to do legally."
U.S. terror database under rights scrutiny
UPI
U.S. rights groups are questioning the validity of a growing federal list of terror suspects that contains at least 235,000 names...
"This really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool," David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocacy group told the Post.
He said the numbers "suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists."
Lawyer: Spy boss undercuts security case by confirming AT&T role
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
A newspaper interview by the nation's spymaster, confirming that telecommunications companies have helped the Bush administration's clandestine surveillance program, has undermined the government's attempt to shield AT&T for its role in the effort, a lawyer for customers of the company said Thursday...
Kurt Opsahl, one of the privacy-rights lawyers representing AT&T customers in San Francisco, said Thursday that McConnell's newspaper comments contradicted the administration's legal position.
"The government has taken such an extreme position that this information is secret, a substantive part of thir argument that these cases must be dismissed," said Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The director of national intelligence candidly confirmed what had been previously asserted to be secret."
Spy Chief Torpedos Government's Lawyering in Spy Cases
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell contradicted the government and his own legal defenses of the nations' telecoms by telling an El Paso newspaper that the companies helped the government with its warrantless wiretapping program. That program ran from October 2001 to January 2006 without court supervision, but now gets special program warrants from a secret spy court...
Just last week, Justice Department lawyers tried to convince the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T because confirming or denying an NSA-AT&T relationship would compromise national security...
EFF lawyer Kurt Opsahl tells THREAT LEVEL that it comes as no surprise that the telcoms worked with the NSA given the evidence in the cases.
"What is interesting is the contrast between McConnell saying this in public and what the government says is a state secret in its court filings," Opsahl said. "It is difficult to read what he is saying as anything other than that the very telcos who are currently being sued are the ones that cooperated with the program."
1998 newsgroup posts could help EFF overturn broad patent on "virtual subdomains"
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project takes aim at another patent as the EFF and lawyer Rick Mc Leod have joined forces to request a USPTO re-examination (PDF) of an Ideaflood patent on "virtual subdomains." According to the request, the patent in question describes capabilities that had already been implemented in Apache when the patent was filed
Report: Official Army Web sites sacrificing security
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Army researchers found security violations on official service Web portals at nearly 40 times the rate of soldiers’ blogs, according to documents from a digital watchdog group released last week.
The data from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was part of the Army’s answer to a lawsuit requesting information about the Army’s tracking and troubleshooting of soldier’s personal sites...
“This shows that bloggers seem to be doing a good job keeping sensitive material off their sites,” said Marcia Hofmann, EFF attorney and spokeswoman. “It appears that where they should be focusing more attention is on their own sites.”
State looks at limiting scanning technology
Michael Gardner, Sign On San Diego
With little thought, many Californians carry wafer-thin cards containing a 15-cent silicon chip that enable them to zip through toll booths, enter parking garages and access the office...
Critics say RFID data can be obtained by lifting the identifying number literally out of someone's pocket with a remote scanner from a couple of feet away. Data bases could be accessed to match the number with other personal information. In one experiment, access cards of several legislative employees were remotely read in elevators and in hallways and cloned, providing the “thief” with access to private, secured areas.
“It sounds like science fiction, but it's quite doable,” said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for privacy rights in the digital world. “It's not paranoia if the threat is real.”
Report: Brass, Not Blogs, Have Loose Lips
Robert Weller, Associated Press
An Army investigative report found that official Army Web sites violated operational security more than military bloggers...
The report was obtained by the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), under orders from a federal district court.
The Army tightened rules on blogging by soldiers in May, requiring that they be cleared by commanders, partly because of concerns the bloggers might reveal information that would help insurgents.
Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Noah Shachtman, Wired News
According to documents released through an EFF lawsuit against the Army and Defense Department, soldier journalists post far less information that could harm military operations than official .mil websites do. These documents called into question the need for new restrictions on soldiers' online speech, which some critics fear will cause military bloggers to cut back on their posts or shut down their sites altogether.
Debate heats up on what's protected by copyright laws
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself -- a challenge to federal copyright laws...
After seeing how debate clips turned up on YouTube and blogs -- and were mashed up into parodies -- "the networks realized that you can either work with people or you can fight them," said Jason Schultz, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law in the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
"This also shows the power of popular marketing on the Internet. How word-of-mouth spread online is being recognized as a legitimate marketing tool," Schultz said.
Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Noah Shachtman, Wired News
The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself -- a challenge to federal copyright laws...
The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity."
Judges Skeptical of State-Secrets Claim
Karl Vick, Washington Post
Lawyers for the Bush administration encountered a federal appeals court Wednesday that appeared deeply skeptical of a blanket claim that the government's surveillance efforts cannot be challenged in court because the litigation might reveal state secrets...
One suit, Hepting v. AT&T, is a class action that grew out of allegations by retired AT&T engineer Mark Klein that the company had cooperated with the National Security Agency to install equipment that funneled Internet traffic to the surveillance agency. A "secret room" described in court filings by Klein was located in an office building on Folsom Street, seven blocks from the courthouse.
U.S. Defends Surveillance to 3 Skeptical Judges
Adam Liptak, New York Times
Three federal appeals court judges hearing challenges to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs appeared skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the Bush administration’s central argument Wednesday: that national security concerns require that the lawsuits be dismissed...
In the AT&T case, the plaintiffs submitted a sworn statement from a former technician for the company who disclosed technical documents about the installation of monitoring equipment at an AT&T Internet switching center in San Francisco.
Mr. Garre, representing the administration, and Michael K. Kellogg, a lawyer for AT&T, said the sworn statement was built on speculation and inferences. Robert D. Fram, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the statement provided more than enough direct evidence to allow the case to go forward.
Classified evidence debated
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
A federal appeals court holding a high-stakes hearing Wednesday in San Francisco on President Bush's clandestine eavesdropping program appeared inclined to keep alive a lawsuit accusing AT&T of illegally letting the government intercept millions of Americans' phone calls and e-mails...
The AT&T suit, like several cases pending against other telecommunications companies, accuses the firm of giving the National Security Agency unlimited access to customers' phone calls, e-mails and message records. Plaintiffs in the AT&T case have submitted a declaration by a former company engineer who said he helped install equipment at the company's San Francisco office that would divert Internet messages to a room reserved for government-cleared employees.
Phone customers, charity challenge U.S. wiretapping
Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times
Justice Department attorneys attempted to persuade three federal appellate court judges Wednesday to dismiss two major lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's warrantless domestic-eavesdropping program...
Plaintiffs' attorney Robert Fram said his clients have powerful evidence that AT&T worked on a huge surveillance program.
Fram, a lawyer working with attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cited a sworn declaration by former AT&T employee Mark Klein, describing a supersecure room in a building in San Francisco where AT&T assembled high-powered dating-mining equipment for a "special job" for the NSA. He said he had heard from other employees that similar operations were being put together in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Seattle.
Federal ID plan raises privacy concerns
Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act...
Colorado and New Hampshire lawmakers are not alone. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation say the IDs and supporting databases -- which Chertoff said would eventually be federally interconnected -- will infringe on privacy.
EFF says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for "a wide range of surveillance activities" by government and businesses that "will be able to easily read your private information" because of the bar code required on each card.
Nation's Soul Is at Stake in NSA Surveillance Case
Jennifer Granick, Wired News
Today the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is hearing arguments on two of the most important cases in decades dealing with the rule of law and personal privacy.
The cases are Hepting v. AT&T and Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush. At stake is whether the government can immunize itself from public oversight and prosecution for illegal activities by claiming that whatever actions it took were done in the name of national security. These cases will also influence whether the government is entitled to warehouse citizen phone calls and e-mails for subsequent unsupervised searching and data mining.
Major copyright case to test First Sale Doctrine, possibly shrinkwrap EULAs
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the case of a California man who has been sued by Universal Music Group for selling promotional CDs...
In addition to responding to UMG's charges, EFF has countersued UMG for sending "takedown" letters to eBay claiming that Augustino's CDs infringed copyright. In a post on EFF's blog, von Lohmann charges that UMG has been "harassing a number of promo CD merchants, sending bogus DMCA takedown notices to eBay, getting auctions suspended, and accounts terminated." Victory in the case would make it easier for other eBay sellers to resist UMG's efforts to shut them down.
Appeals court may let NSA lawsuits proceed
Declan McCullagh , CNET News.com
A federal appeals court on Wednesday appeared unwilling to end a pair of lawsuits that claim the Bush administration engaged in widespread illegal surveillance of Americans...
n the first case, called Hepting v. AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other attorneys had filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T saying it unlawfully opened its networks to the NSA. Last summer, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco ruled that it could proceed.
Feds urge appeals court to dismiss eavesdropping lawsuits
Paul Elias, Associated Press
Government lawyers, citing national security risks, urged an appeals court Wednesday to toss out two legal challenges to a Bush administration anti-terror program that allowed government spies to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants...
Robert Fram, who represents the AT&T customers, said the best evidence that his clients' communications were intercepted comes from a former AT&T engineer who spoke to the media. The engineer said the company installed a special room with highly limited access at its San Francisco offices that contained equipment designed specifically for surveillance.
Domestic Spying Programs Under Fire In Court
Mark Matthews, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in two lawsuits brought by groups who believe they've been subjects of the government's eavesdropping.
One group, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is suing AT&T for allegedly funneling phone lines wholesale into computers, and then turning the information over to the government.
Lawsuits May Illuminate Methods of Spy Program
Dan Eggen, Washington Post
In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a "special job" by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician...
"If the courts take the position that the state-secrets privilege prevents the case from going forward, I think effectively there'll never be a decision about the legality of the program," said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director. "I think it's tremendously important for that."
E-ZPass to Divorce
Good Morning America, ABC News
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien is featured in the video.
AT&T Tells Court That Secret Wiretapping Destroys Privacy (in 1927)
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The first time the Supreme Court heard a case about whether the government had the right to spy on Americans conversations without a warrant, AT&T filed a brief with the court arguing that such spying was inimical to democracy. That document was blogged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is now suing the nation's largest telecom for its alleged participation in warrantless dragnet spying and data-mining of Amercians' phone calls and internet use.
Video Site Veoh Sues To Stop Universal
Richard Koman , Top Tech News
Faced with saber-rattling by Universal Music Group (UMG), online video sharing network Veoh has requested a federal judge to rule that its business is protected by the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
If the courts decide against Veoh or Google and its YouTube property, the legal landscape for such Web 2.0 sites could be substantially altered. "Google has basically been following the advice of the best lawyers in Silicon Valley," Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred Von Lohmann said at the time Viacom filed its case. "If Viacom wins, that would call into doubt all of the business models that relied on the same kinds of legal advice."
AT&T Wiretapping Case Headed for Hearing
Stephen Lawson, PC World
A federal appeals court will hear arguments next Wednesday on whether to stop a class-action privacy suit that is based on allegations that the government and AT&T Inc. have been working together in an illegal wiretapping program.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the case in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco last year on behalf of Tash Hepting and other AT&T customers. The suit alleges AT&T cooperated with the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance of millions of customers' communications illegally, violating the customers' privacy.
Wiretapping Bill Puts Telcos on Hold
Massimo Calabresi, TIME
By most appearances, President Bush scored a rare and much sought-after victory last weekend...
The question will surface in coming weeks as lawyers for the government, the telecommunications companies and activist organizations face off in a California court. Next Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments as the government seeks to dismiss a case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others claiming AT&T illegally intercepted and provided to the government calls and e-mails of Americans.
Can Anyone Police File Sharing?
Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed
Campus file sharing briefly hit prominence in Congress last week as colleges lobbied against a proposed amendment in the Senate to the Higher Education Act reauthorization that would have required universities to use “technology-based” systems to try to block illegal downloading activity. While the amendment was withdrawn, it may be revived in the House — and certainly the entertainment industry has no intention of letting the issue go away...
“The response has not been to dampen students’ enthusiasm for downloading music,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is critical of lawsuits targeting online music downloaders.
Bush, Dems Deadlock Over Surveillance Program
Mark Matthews, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Summer vacations are on hold in Washington. Lawmakers are planning for a weekend of work, trying to hammer out an agreement with the White House over the terrorist surveillance program...
Cindy Cohn, EFF Legal Director: "This was really a big rush by the administration at the last minute and there are a lot of members of Congress who I think are frankly uncomfortable with voting in the dark like this."
Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom
Daniela Deane, Washington Post
Jhannet Sejas and her boyfriend were celebrating her 19th birthday by taking in a matinee showing of the hit movie "Transformers" at the theater at Ballston Common mall...
"The movie industry needs to recognize that their audience isn't the enemy," said Cindy Cohn, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that specializes in digital rights issues. "They need to stop treating their fans like criminals. . . . What they're doing is extremely unreasonable, coming down on this poor girl who was actually trying to promote their movie."
Mining MySpace
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
Most Web users will admit to having used MySpace or Facebook to spy on their teenage kids or an ex-significant other. But Stephen Patton has made social network snooping into a science...
The lesson for social networkers is to filter their MySpace postings before they hit the Web, says Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "These kinds of tools emphasize that when users post information to Web sites, it can be collected by law enforcement or anyone else who cares," Bankston says. "You shouldn't have any illusions about the fact that you're publishing to the world."
Support for Attorney General Gonzales slips further
Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor
Seldom have a cabinet official and a Congress been so at odds. After months of bickering over fired US attorneys, congressional subpoenas, and secret eavesdropping, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now has few supporters left on Capitol Hill, even among his fellow Republicans...
"The administration has finally copped to a broader [surveillance] program," wrote Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in a July 31 analysis of recent developments in the case.
