13 December 2011
How the US censors the world's internet, and the imminent law change which would make it far worse
Last week they backed down over a single site, dajaz1.com, a popular hip hop blog. They had mistakenly shut it down for over a year, denied all due process, and hid all the details. Despite their obvious lie that none of their seizures were being challenged, they had refused to respond to requests for basic information from dajaz1's lawyer for the entire time. Now that the domain is released, the RIAA continues to threaten dajaz1 with legal action, despite no evidence of wrongdoing, for daring to compete with their business.
This isn't just problematic for reasons of fair competition, due process, and free speech, but also for privacy, as ICE's method is also a means of internet surveillance.
Today the popular sharing website Megaupload announced it is suing Universal for taking down its content from YouTube - content that Universal has no rights to whatsoever. It is this kind of thing which causes thousands of videos to be wrongfully removed every day - YouTube's takedown policy is "shoot first, ask questions never". Usually the rightful uploader can't afford the legal fees, so it's nice to see rare instances like this where the issue gets a chance in court.
These examples from the last week are excellent demonstrations of situations which will be made far worse if US laws like SOPA and PROTECTIP are passed. I previously blogged about PROTECTIP, under which US citizens could get 6 years jail for uploading a video of themselves singing a copyrighted song. SOPA, an even more draconian law, is being debated in the House of Representatives on Thursday. Here's an infographic summary of SOPA, and another summarizing the legal battle. SOPA could destroy the internet - and my language is not too strong.
The imminent passing of SOPA is highlighting the ridiculous hypocrisy of the White House on internet issues that I blogged about in August, and mainstream media is beginning to catch on to the duplicity.
While Chinese users appreciate the irony of SOPA, MPAA boss Chris Dodd actually asked, "If the Chinese censor the internet without a problem, why can't the US?".
Update 14 December: Amendments have been introduced that water down SOPA a bit - the jist of it remains, but it's not quite as insane. It now targets only non-US sites (since US sites can already be dealt with legally) - although for the end-user it's not at all obvious whether a site is foreign or not, and US sites will still be required to self-censor references to those foreign sites. Breaking the internet's DNS system is no longer required, but optional. Also,
Under the amended plan, which was released late Monday, a judge would have to order ad networks to stop doing business with a site “dedicated” to infringing activities. Under the original proposal, a rights holder could make those demands on an ad network or payment processor and effectively kill off the site.
The amendment, however, still gives legal immunity to financial institutions and ad networks that choose to boycott "rogue" sites."
And there are other reasons it's still a very bad law.
Update 10 January 2012:
- The controversy over SOPA has been almost completely ignored by the US TV networks. Not surprising as they all enthusiastically support the bill, and more public attention is unlikely to help their cause. Since October 1, there has only been a single segment covering the issue, by CNN (which did not disclose its parent company Time Warner's support for the bill). Surely this will change as SOPA is becoming an election issue.
- Every member of congress has received more campaign money from supporters than from opposers, usually significantly more (10-70 times as much). So far, supporters have given $92m and opposers $7m. Despite the fact that the opposing internet companies make far more in profits than the big media companies driving the bill.
16 August 2011
US internet policy hypocrisy
In a landmark speech that defined Internet freedom as a key tenet of U.S. foreign policy, [US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton] repeatedly named countries, including China, which had thwarted progress. ''Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society," Clinton said. "Countries or individuals that engage in cyber-attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.'' She warned "countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century."
Washington Post, 20 January 2011
That sounds great. But let's examine it for a moment:
"Countries or individuals that engage in cyber-attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.''
Is Clinton condemning the US? Cyberwarfare is a reality and the US is, as in every other military technology, at the forefront of it. In 2008 Congress ordered DARPA to spend $30 billion or so on cyberwarfare technology. The US has been conducting cyber attacks for years, for instance this one in 2008 on a webforum in Saudi Arabia (which inadvertently disrupted more than 300 other servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas). The Department of Defense knows the danger the internet poses to their military power. An American think-tank influential on the Bush Administration wrote:
Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the "infosphere" will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.
Or this from a document commissioned by the Pentagon in 2003:
DoD's "Defense in Depth" strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will "fight the net" as it would a weapons system.
Still, it's understandable that Clinton would say something like that - even US head of cybersecurity Howard Schmidt said in March 2010:
There is no cyberwar... I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept. There are no winners in that environment.
"White House Cyber Czar: ‘There Is No Cyberwar’", Wired magazine
So the White House is saying one thing, while the DoD continues their massive effort to conduct covert cyber-attacks and improve their attack capabilities. The same is true of internet censorship:
"Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society."
"Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century."
Indeed, the US is spending $19m to help people circumvent government internet filtering. But it hardly compares to the $30b the DoD is spending to do the exact opposite - developing tools to take control of the internet and block unwanted traffic.
It also doesn't compare to the censorship and surveillance tools sold by US companies (Cisco, Oracle, Motorola and others) to repressive states like China and Iran. A leaked internal Cisco presentation from 2002 talks about how its products can be used to address China's goals of "maintaining stability" and "combat 'Falun Gong' evil religion and other hostiles". The US is making no effort to prevent the sale of surveillance and filtering tools to authoritarian regimes.
At the same time, commercial interests have successfully convinced the US to filter the internet against file-sharing and video websites, despite this being in violation of the US constitution. Due to pressure from "American companies" - namely, the entertainment oligopoly - it is using free trade agreements to successfully pressure governments worldwide (eg. UK, NZ, France, South Korea) to push through copyright laws in violation of their own constitutions (as well as the US constitution). These laws are having a chilling effect on free speech through subversion of copyright law.
Other quotes from Clinton in the same Washington Post article:
"Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere... American companies need to take a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand."
"We must be wary of the steel vise in which many governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit"
It's a good call. But it's doublethink.
Not only is the US leading the way in developing tools to disrupt the internet, shutting down international websites, censoring peer-to-peer communication technologies to appease select industries, and pushing undemocratic laws onto other counties.
Along with other western governments they are increasingly shutting down cellphone and internet communication in an effort to prevent protests.
In future posts I'll write more about censorship and how the US government is being tempted to go too far, with no real benefit to national security or public order.
Whether government duplicity on cyberwarfare and censorship is strategic and intentional, or a result of confusion and division (probably both): if the land of the free wants to stay that way, the brave need to step up and ensure it.
Other sources
- "Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet", Infowars.net
12 August 2011
Fined for using the internet? Possible as of yesterday in NZ
I'm considering leaving Posterous for something better: Wikia! I'm still working it out, until I do I'll cross-post the links to here.
Full post from yesterday
(This is the sequel to last week's post, "From next week, P2P in New Zealand is illegal".)
10 August 2011
Reasons for the UK riots
Firstly, the latest footage.
Many are proud of their looting and vandalism - these girls say they're "showing the rich people we can do what we want". Why?
Ros Griffiths, who runs the Employment café in Brixton, which provides advice to jobseekers, says the violence across the capital is the result of years of tension between working-class people and the authorities.
"Young people who feel vulnerable feel that there's no jobs, there's no future, there's no prospects. They feel that nobody cares about them so they don't care.
"They've lost respect for authority because at the end of the day if it was just about what happened in Tottenham, that'd be an isolated situation. That was just a trigger," Ms Griffiths says.
A theory echoed by Professor John Pitts, a criminologist who advises several London local authorities on young people and gangs:
Prof Pitts says riots are complex events and cannot be explained away as "just thuggery".
They have to be seen against the backdrop of "growing discontents" about youth unemployment, education opportunities and income disparities.
He says most of the rioters are from poor estates who have no "stake in conformity", who have nothing to lose.
"They have no career to think about. They are not 'us'. They live out there on the margins, enraged, disappointed, capable of doing some awful things."
The best thing I've read on the insufficiency of the knee-jerk condemnation that we've been hearing so loudly is this blog post from someone living in one of the rioting areas. Why don't people seem to understand that asking why is important? Do they really think crime can be prevented without understanding its causes?
More discussions worth reading about the "growing discontents":
- conditions similar to those before the Great Depression (The Telegraph, 8 Aug)
- resentment against the police and the wealthy (The Guardian, 8 Aug)
- The poor are copying the rich by looting (Liberal Conspiracy blog, 9 Aug)
- (Added 14 Aug): Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won't Be the Last City to Burn (The Atlantic, 10 Aug)
Meanwhile, as usual with disasters of all kinds nowadays, there are spur-of-the-moment web-apps trying to help the situation: Zavilia is crowdsourced criminal identification.
On the other side of the technology, more reasons to be careful what you say on Facebook:
1644 GMT: Two 18-year-olds are arrested in Folkestone, Kent, after Scotland Yard says a number of "inflammatory" comments were seen on Facebook in relation to rioting in London and other cities.
1436 GMT: Strathclyde Police have arrested a 16-year-old from Glasgow after a Facebook message allegedly inciting others to commit acts of disorder. Police say they're monitoring social networking sites closely and will take "decisive action" to prevent copycat violence in the Strathclyde force area.
As of 1650 GMT, Scotland Yard says 563 people have been arrested in relation to the riots, and 105 people have been charged. The youngest person arrested is 11 years old. As usual for violent protests, there will be innocent people caught up in it.
More worrying is the recent announcement from the Met that plastic bullets (a British invention for reducing fatalities) are now being given to police to use against the crowds. Thankfully nowadays riot police are much more measured in their approach - frustrating as that may be, the police are protecting life, not property, so hopefully innocent people aren't killed, as happened with plastic bullets in Northern Island.
All of the above found through the BBC's live feed (the page is currently struggling to keep up with traffic).
Update 11 August: Russel Brand agrees.
Update 14 August: My follow-up post.
3 August 2011
From next week, P2P in New Zealand is illegal
Well, it won't actually be illegal - but you could get fined anyway.
Thanks to a Facebook discussion on the 3strikesNZ page, I've discovered yet another reason the NZ copyright amendment is bad. Non IT-geeks can skip the next paragraph, to summarize it: some rightsholders are targeting not just infringing files, but potentially any user using some kinds of peer-to-peer filesharing software.
Apparently some rightsholders are using the BitTorrent DHT (distributed hash table) to find infringing users. This is terrible practice, because a BitTorrent client, simply by running (even if it has never downloaded or uploaded anything, let alone anything infringing), participates in the DHT and passes on information about which peer to get files from - and some of those files may be infringing. A rightsholder using this method can't distinguish between clients simply participating in the DHT, and those actually sharing the file.
This applies to not just BitTorrent, but any other P2P software using a DHT, eg. eMule, LimeWire, BearShare, Shareaza, giFT clients...
We can reasonably expect these infringement notices to get through the Copyright Tribunal unchallenged, because to challenge it the accuser needs technical knowledge of how their P2P software works. Otherwise all they can say is "I don't know why you think I infringed, I just know I didn't", which of course won't hold up since it's not evidence. People in that situation probably won't bother going to the Copyright Tribunal, they'll just pay the fine.
Come September, it is possible that people will be fined simply for using P2P software.
Hopefully this will help highlight the problems with the new law - despite rightsholder groups pointing to their innocent victims and saying "look how many people we've caught infringing!"
To lazy / non-technically minded people, to be totally safe you should uninstall all your P2P programs. Or, if you're careful and you have some basic knowledge, read the next paragraph:
If you want to be certain to avoid infringement notices, you have to ensure you never run P2P programs using DHT, except through a proxy (which may have a signigicant negative impact your speeds). Don't use BitTorrent through Tor - since you should to be careful that all data goes through Tor, not just the initial connection to the tracker, which slows down both your connection, and everyone else's on the network. If you're not using a proxy for all your data, you you need to either disable DHT (which will also slow you down as you won't connect to as many peers), or stop such P2P programs from running on startup or ever. You could still file-share using a seedbox, or filesharing software designed to be anonymous, like OneSwarm or I2P.
It's worth starting to do this on Thursday (August 11th) rather than September 1st, since you can get notices for activity 21 days before the notice is sent. Tony Eaton, director of NZFACT (NZ Federation Against Copyright Theft), representing the MPAA, says they won't backdate notices from September 1, but the law isn't stopping them or other rightsholders from doing so.
It's ridiculous that I'm giving such advice. I'm a big fan of peer-to-peer for legitimate filesharing, especially in isolated countries like New Zealand, as it means less bandwidth usage, faster download speeds, and better content discovery. Too bad.
There's another important ramification: Don't let any untrusted or ignorant person use your computer or your connection, since they could run a file-sharing program, and even a few seconds of use is enough for the rightsholders' tracking software to potentially find you.
More essential reading on the new copyright law:
Update (1 day later): This doesn't seem to be at all common - it may have happened a few times, but you're unlikely to be caught this way. Still it is a possibility, so if you want certainty, you should take this into account. I've made edits to highlight that.
Sequel (1 week later): This pales in comparison to how rightsholder groups could get people fined just for using the internet... Fined for using the internet? Possible as of today in NZ
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