Boing Boing » corruption

Men in Toronto Mayor Rob Ford photo arrested in gang sweep

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:50:01 +0000

Toronto police carried out a series of dramatic raids on alleged gang-members across the city in Friday. They raided 15 Windsor Rd, a run-down and notorious bungalow that is also noteworthy for providing the backdrop against which Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford was photographed, arms around three men -- two of whom were arrested in the sweep, the third of whom was murdered in an apparent drug-related slaying. The photo of Ford was provided by the now-unlocatable gentlemen who offered to sell the Toronto Star and Gawker a video of the mayor allegedly smoking crack.

The mayor reportedly told his staff that he knew where the video was, and gave an address in a high rise in the suburb of Etobicoke (that unit was also raided in the sweeps), but insisted to the press that the video didn't exist at all. Many have speculated that the mayor or his representatives arranged to have the video deleted. However, given that at least one computer was seized in the raids, it's possible that the may yet surface.

In the meantime, we're left with the mayor palling around with men whom the police consider to be members of organised crime; a Globe and Mail investigation that accused the mayor's brother, Councillor Doug Ford, of having served as one of Toronto's top drug dealers in the 1980s, and a mayor who refuses to directly address important questions about his conduct:

Kassim, 20, was arrested in the raids Thursday and has been charged with trafficking in weapons and drugs (cocaine and marijuana) for the benefit of a criminal organization. He also faces charges of conspiracy to commit unauthorized possession of a firearm, breach of house arrest, and theft under $5,000.
His longtime friend, Muhammad Khattak, also flanking the mayor in the photo, was charged with participating in cocaine trafficking for the benefit of a criminal organization and trafficking in marijuana.
Police officers carried evidence bags, including what appeared to be a Toshiba laptop, out of the 19-year-old’s home on Mercury Rd. Thursday.
Khattak was wounded in the same March shooting that killed the third man in the photo, Anthony Smith.

Dixon Road raids help complete infamous Rob Ford photo

UPDATED: NSA admits it listens in on US phone calls and reads US emails without a warrant

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:38:55 +0000

It's a pity that so many senators skipped the NSA's classified briefing on its secret spying program, because if they'd attended, they'd have heard something shocking: the NSA can and does access the content of emails and phone calls of Americans on US soil without a warrant. It's an important insight into the President's secret interpretation of FISA, one of America's most notorious spying laws.

Update: Rep. Nadler has denied that this is what he meant: “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”

However, he does not deny that the NSA can access the contents of the call, not ruling out the possibility of the NSA using contractors, or speech-to-text, or some other indirect method, to accomplish "listening in" by other means.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The NSA is supposed to only spy on us dirty foreigners. As sketchy as it is to divide the world into the spied-upon and the un-spied-upon, it is nevertheless the law, and should be comforting to those the latter category. This revelation confirms that the Obama administration has doubled down on GW Bush's project of lawless, authoritarian surveillance, treating the Constitution and Congress's laws as mere formalities. So much for "the most transparent administration in history."

NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants [Declan McCullagh/Cnet]

What's happening in São Paulo?

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:00:36 +0000

Between Syria, Turkey and the G8, it's hard to keep track of popular resistance to oligarchy and corruption, but please don't forget São Paulo, where the police are treating public anti-corruption demonstrations with all the bedwetting cowardice of a tinpot dictatorship. Here's Feridos no protesto em São Paulo, a multilingual tumblr devoted to covering the protests, and above, an excellent video from Change Brazil explaining what's at stake.

Amid violent protest crackdown, Sao Paulo cop smashes his own car's window

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:08:38 +0000

From Sao Paulo, where the the cops are violently attacking protesters, a video of a cop smashing his own police-car window, presumably to blame it on the protesters later.

Policial Quebra Vidro da Própria Viatura - São Paulo 13/6/2013

And here's a glimpse of the Sao Paulo police's advanced media strategy.

Greek government shuts down state broadcaster, police force journalists out of the building

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 05:31:33 +0000

Michael sez, "The Greek government forcibly shut down transmissions of all TV and radio stations operated by the state-owned broadcaster ERT, with police ejecting journalists and other employees who were occupying the buildings."

A few hours ago, the Greek government announced that state television and radio channels would be silenced at midnight. No public debate, no debate in Parliament, no warning. Nothing. ERT, the Greek version of the BBC, will simply fold its tent and steal into the night. As probably the only Greek commentator to have been blacklisted by ERT over the past two years, I feel I have the moral authority to cry out against ERT’s passing. To shout from the rooftops that its murder by our troika-led government is a crime against public media that all civilised people, the world over, should rise up against.

ERT (Greek state tv-radio) is dead: A blacklisted person’s lament

#ert twitpic.com/cwqjtk
— maria (@mouzakiti) June 11, 2013

Simdi neden kardesiz anladik mi? Canim Atina'm ~ “@polyfimos: Χιλιάδες κόσμος στο προαύλιο της #ERT. #rbnews twitter.com/Polyfimos/stat…”
— Vlado Sestakof (@VSestakof) June 12, 2013

Thousands of people outside #ert. twitter.com/Cyberela/statu…
— Cyberella (@Cyberela) June 11, 2013

Live blogging #ert enet.gr/369225 youtu.be/1p1GVSAOpRA?a
— enetgr (@enetgr) June 11, 2013

now (03:35) outside #ert headquarters RT @alepouda: #ert τωρα twitter.com/alepouda/statu…
— spyros gkelis (@northaura) June 12, 2013

UK government online disability benefits signup requires IE6

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:01:08 +0000

Robin sez,

I'm one of the campaigns managers at 38 Degrees (the UK's largest online campaign organisation). One of our members has recently started a petition calling on the UK government to update their web technology. When I saw it I immediately thought of boing boing and wondered if you could help spread the word.
To claim Disability Living Allowance or Attendance Allowance in the UK people are being asked to use Internet Explorer 5 or 6 and other systems that are so out of date they are available on less than 2% of computers. If you want to claim online you will need to take a step back to the 1990s and hunt through second hand shops for an old PC that you can power up.
It's a crazy situation.

Update Online DLA Claim System (Thanks, Robin!)

UK spies have access to NSA Prism, which has "direct access" to world's largest Internet companies' servers

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:16:28 +0000

A report by Nick Hopkins in the Guardian accuses the UK spy agency GCHQ of making use of the American NSA's Prism program, which was revealed in leaked documents earlier today -- a slide presentation claiming that the NSA had direct access to the servers at Google, Microsoft, Apple, and many other Internet giants.

According to Hopkins, GCHQ has been able to access Prism since Jun 2010. This is based on information from the same leaked slide deck, apparently:

Unless GCHQ has stopped using Prism, the agency has accessed information from the programme for at least three years. It is not mentioned in the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which scrutinises the way the UK's three security agencies use the laws covering the interception and retention of data.
Asked to comment on its use of Prism, GCHQ said it "takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the intelligence and security committee".
The agency refused to be drawn on how long it had been using Prism, how many intelligence reports it had gleaned from it, or which ministers knew it was being used.
A GCHQ spokesperson added: "We do not comment on intelligence matters."

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

Scary Russian business-man insists he isn't scary: "you are in no possible danger of being murdered if you come to Moscow!"

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:55:55 +0000

Brian Krebs reports on the Russian arrest of Pavel Vrublevsky, owner of the ChronoPay service (about whom Krebs has written an upcoming book) for witness intimidation. Vrublevsky is on trial for hiring hackers to attack a ChronoPay competitor called Assist, and he admitted that he phoned a witness in the trial and offered that person money; the witness said "he felt pressured and threatened by the offer."

Where this gets good is where Krebs recounts his own conversation with Vrublevsky, when the Russian businessman offered Krebs money as well:

“My proposition to you is to come to Moscow, and if you don’t have money….I realize journalists are not such wealthy people in America, we’re happy to pay for it,” Vrublevsky said in a phone conversation on May 8, 2010.
When I politely declined his invitation, Vrublevsky laughed and said I was wrong to feel like I was being bribed or intimidated.
“It’s quite funny that you think somehow when you fly to meet me in Moscow or ChronoPay offices that you are in any possible danger from me for being murdered,” Vrublevsky said. “Come to Moscow and see for yourself. Take your notebook, come to my office. Sit in front of me and look around. Because you’re getting information, which, to be honest, is not factual.”

As you can see, Vrublevsky is a master of putting people at their ease with his warm and cuddly demeanor, as is evidenced by his official Facebook profile photo, above.

Vrublevsky Arrested for Witness Intimidation

W3C insider explains what's wrong with cramming DRM into HTML5 - and what you can do about it

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:41:38 +0000

I've written before here about the move to get the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) to cram digital rights management (DRM) into the next version of HTML, called HTML5. This week, EFF filed a formal objection with the group, setting out some of the risks to the open Web from standardizing DRM in the Web's core technical specs. Now, writing in the Guardian, W3C staffer Dr Harry Halpin makes an important, well-thought-through case for keeping DRM out of the HTML5 standard. Haplin's got an invaluable insider view of the "crisis of representation" that let a few giant companies shift the most open, most vital standards body involved with the Web into the position of standardizing ways to have your computer and browser take control away from you, and to set the stage for a ban on free and open source software in Web browsers and computers.

The most important part is what you can do to help shift the direction of the W3C back towards the open Web:

The Advisory Committee of the W3C is composed of companies as well as universities and non-profits. If your employer is a W3C member, now is the time to open the discussion internally with your management. Questions over whether DRM should be part of the HTML Working Group or part of another Working Group - or outside of W3C entirely! - are dealt with in the review of charters by Advisory Committee representatives. It's at this level that the EFF objected to EME in HTML. If your organisation is not a member, your organisation can join the W3C. W3C membership fees have been adapted to organisations large and small, for-profit and non-profit, start-ups, and for organisations in developing countries.
If you work for a W3C member, now is the time to join the HTML Working Group. The HTML Working Group are working through the technical details of Encrypted Media Extensions in the HTML Working Group Media Task Force. Also, the HTML WG has a very liberal Invited Expert policy to allow participation by those domain experts who don't work for W3C member organisations. Questions and objections that go beyond the technical content and charter are generally considered out of scope.
Questions that go beyond technically working on EME should be aimed at the Restricted Media Community Group, which anyone can join. Unlike Working Groups, W3C Community Groups provide a forum for discussion but do not themselves publish standards. Disappointingly, so far the discussion has been pretty weak, but this Community Group is monitored by many people deeply involved in the DRM debates.
Also, W3C Working Groups such as the HTML Working Group take technical comments from anyone on the entire web. Public comments can be made by ordinary users; the Working Group must formally address these comments if the comment is within the scope of the charter and done before the standard is complete. That means you can in public comment on EME or any other standard like the cryptographic primitives as pursued by the Web Cryptography Working Group, which can be used to exchange private messages between human rights activists as well as be part of Netflix's plan to switch to HTML5.

DRM and HTML5: it's now or never for the Open Web

DHS on border laptop searches: we can't tell you why this is legal, and we won't limit searches to reasonable suspicion

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:00:17 +0000

The DHS has responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU asking when and how it decides whose laptop to search at the border. It explained its legal rationale for conducting these searches with a blank page:

On Page 18 of the 52-page document under the section entitled “First Amendment,” several paragraphs are completely blacked out. They simply end with the sentence: “The laptop border searches in the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights as defined by the courts."

More excellence from "the most transparent administration in American history." Also, the DHS rejected claims that it should limit searches to situations where it had reasonable grounds for suspicion, because then they would have to explain their suspicion:

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

Feds say they can search your laptop at the border but won’t say why [Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica]

Leaked top-secret court order shows that NSA engages in bulk, sustained, warrantless surveillance of Americans

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 05:25:03 +0000

In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed on Verizon's network, even calls that originated and terminated in the USA (the NSA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans). This kind of dragnet surveillance has long been rumored; Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall published an open letter to US Attorney General Holden saying that "most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted...the Patriot Act." Here, at last, are the details:

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".
The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold point out, this kind of surveillance is at the heart of several of its ongoing cases, and the Obama administration has done everything in its power to stop the American people from finding out how it interprets the Constitution:

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but it's predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted surveillance.

But at each step of the way, the government has tried to hide the truth from the American public: in Jewel, behind the state secrets privilege; in the FOIA case, by claiming the information is classified top secret.

Time for total war on patent trolls

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 01:21:10 +0000

Writing in The New Yorker, Tim Wu calls for "total war on patent trolls" and lays out a roadmap for attacking the extortionists who are costing the US economy a reported $30B/year by extorting license fees for patents that never should have been issued and don't cover what the patent trolls say they cover.

There are good laws in place that could fight trolls, but they sit largely unused. First are the consumer-protection laws, which bar “unfair or deceptive acts and practices.” Some patent trolls, to better coerce settlement, purposely misrepresent matters such as the strength of their patents, the extent of other settlements, and their actual willingness to litigate. Second, there are plenty of remedies available under the unfair-competition laws. Some trolls work by aggregating an enormous number of patents, and then present the threat that one of their thousands of patents might actually be valid. The creation of these portfolios for trolling may be “agreements in restraint of trade” under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, or they may “substantially lessen competition” under the Clayton Antitrust Act. More generally, the methods of the trolls are hardly what you would call ordinary methods of competition; they should be considered, rather, what the Federal Trade Commission calls “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act. The Commission has the power to define and punish methods of business that are inherently harmful with few or no redeeming benefits, and that’s what trolling is. Finally, it is possible that the criminal laws barring larceny and schemes to defraud may cover the conduct of some trolls.

How to Make War on Patent Trolls

Anonymizing is really hard really, so why is the EU acting like it's easy?

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:54:40 +0000

My latest Guardian column is "Data protection in the EU: the certainty of uncertainty," a look at the absurdity of having privacy rules that describes some data-sets as "anonymous" and others as "pseudonymous," while computer scientists in the real world are happily re-identifying "anonymous" data-sets with techniques that grow more sophisticated every day. The EU is being lobbied as never before on its new data protection rules, mostly by US IT giants, and the new rules have huge loopholes for "anonymous" and "pseudonymous" data that are violently disconnected from the best modern computer science theories. Either the people proposing these categories don't really care about privacy, or they don't know enough about it to be making up the rules -- either way, it's a bad scene.

Since the mid-noughties, de-anonymising has become a kind of full-contact sport for computer scientists, who keep blowing anonymisation schemes out of the water with clever re-identifying tricks. A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports showed how the "anonymised" data from a European phone company (likely one in Belgium) could be re-identified with 95% accuracy, given only four points of data about each person (with only two data-points, more than half the users in the set could be re-identified).
Some will say this doesn't matter. They'll say that privacy is dead, or irrelevant, or unimportant. If you agree, remember this: the reason anonymisation and pseudonymisation are being contemplated in the General Data Protection Regulation is because its authors say that privacy is important, and worth preserving. They are talking about anonymising data-sets because they believe that anonymisation will protect privacy – and that means that they're saying, implicitly, privacy is worth preserving. If that's policy's goal, then the policy should pursue it in ways that conform to reality as we understand it.
Indeed, the whole premise of "Big Data" is at odds with the idea that data can be anonymised. After all, Big Data promises that with very large data-sets, subtle relationships can be teased out. In the world of re-identifying, they talk about "sparse data" approaches to de-anonymisation. Though most of your personal traits are shared with many others, there are some things about you that are less commonly represented in the set – maybe the confluence of your reading habits and your address; maybe your city of birth in combination with your choice of cars.

Data protection in the EU: the certainty of uncertainty

Rob Ford crack-smoking video is "gone"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:00:22 +0000

Gawker's John Cook has finally gotten in touch with the guy who offered to sell him a video of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford smoking crack. Bad news: the guy says the video is "gone":

But I have heard independently from others familiar with the goings-on in Toronto that leaders in its Somali community have determined who the owner is and brought intense pressure to bear on him and his family. Toronto's "Little Mogadishu" neighborhood is located in the ward Rob Ford represented when he was a city councillor; though he is a conservative and a racist buffoon, I am told he has long-standing connections to Somali power brokers there.
Which brings us to this past Friday, when the intermediary called to tell me that he had finally heard from the owner. And his message was: "It's gone. Leave me alone." It was, the intermediary told me, a short conversation.
"It's gone" could mean many things. It might mean that the video has been destroyed. It might mean that it has been handed over to Ford or his allies. It might mean that he intends to sell or give it to a Canadian media outlet. It might mean that the Toronto Police Department has seized it and plans to use it as evidence in a criminal investigation. It might mean that it has been transferred to the custody of Somali community leaders for safekeeping. It might be a lie. The intermediary doesn't know. Neither do I.

The Rob Ford Crack Video Might Be "Gone"

Pirate Bay outs porno copyright trolls: they're the ones pirating their own files

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:15:40 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness's report on Prenda Law (previously), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of being sued and forever having your name linked with embarrassing pornography). The witness said that he believed that Prenda -- and its principal, John Steele -- had been responsible for seeding and sharing the files they accused others of pirating.

After hearing about this, the administrators for The Pirate Bay dug through their logs and published a damning selection of log entries showing that many of the files that Steele and his firm accused others of pirating were uploaded by Steele himself, or someone with access to his home PC.

The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files.
The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs.
The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable.
While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far.

The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

Porno copyright trolls Prenda: expert says they pirated their own movies to get victims to download

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 03:00:30 +0000

The saga of porno-copyright-trolls Prenda Law (previously) just keeps getting more tawdry. Prenda is a mysterious extortionate lawsuit-threat-factory that claimed to represent pornographers when it sent thousands (and thousands!) of legal threats to people, telling them they'd get embroiled in ugly litigation that would forever tie their names to embarrassing pornography titles unless they paid hush money.

Their con has unraveled in a series of legal losses. Now, one of their victims has had an expert witness file an affidavit in First Time Videos vs. Paul Oppold, a case in Florida. The expert fields an astonishing accusation: Prenda Law's principle, John Steele, is the person who uploaded the infringing pornography in the first place, listing it on BitTorrent index sites with information inviting people to download it -- people whom he then sent legal threats to for downloading those selfsame movies.

Among other things, sharkmp4 seemed to be able to post these works on The Pirate Bay before the works were even mentioned anywhere else, and in at least one case, "sharkmp4" put a video up on The Pirate Bay three days before Prenda shell company Ingenuity 13 had even filed for the copyright. On top of that, the "forensics" company that Prenda uses -- which is supposedly run by Paul Hansmeier's brother Peter, but which had its domain registered and controlled by (you guessed it) John Steele -- apparently identified "infringements" almost immediately after the videos were placed on The Pirate Bay -- meaning they were likely looking for such infringement in conjunction with the upload.
At the end, however, Neville pulls together really damning evidence, tying together a website set up to distribute Ingenuity 13 porn films with the same exact IP address that was confirmed as being used by John Steele to log into his own GoDaddy account, highlighting how Steele -- or someone with access to his logins -- clearly has full access and control over Ingenuity 13 works. As you read through all of the evidence it appears highly likely that Steele is in control of Ingenuity 13, despite all his protests to the contrary.
As the filing notes:
Prenda Law's business structure is such that it is pirate, forensic pirate hunter, and attorney. It also appears that Prenda Law also wants to/has formed/is forming a corporate structure where it is: pornography producer, copyright holder, pornography pirate, forensic investigator, attorney firm, and debt collector. Other than the omission of appearing in the pornography themselves, this would represent an entire in-house copyright trolling monopoly- not designed to promote their own works for distribution and sale, but to induce infringement of their works and reap profits seen from mass anti-piracy litigation.

New Filing Presents Evidence That John Steele Uploaded Videos To BitTorrent Himself

Northern Ireland builds a Potemkin Village for the G8

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:04:19 +0000

The G8 Summit is coming to Fermanagh, a county in Northern Ireland that has been devastated by austerity. To spruce things up and maintain the fiction that austerity will get us out of the global economic depression, the county has spent £300,000 giving local businesses "a facelift" -- including installing a fake butcher-shop window full of imaginary meat in a derelict storefront.

Two shops in Belcoo, right on the border with Blacklion, Co Cavan, have been painted over to appear as thriving businesses. The reality, as in other parts of the county, is rather more stark.
Just a few weeks ago, Flanagan’s – a former butcher’s and vegetable shop in the neat village – was cleaned and repainted with bespoke images of a thriving business placed in the windows. Any G8 delegate passing on the way to discuss global capitalism would easily be fooled into thinking that all is well with the free-market system in Fermanagh..
The butcher’s business has been replaced by a picture of a butcher’s business. Across the road is a similar tale. A small business premises has been made to look like an office supplies store. It used to be a pharmacy, now relocated on the village main street.
Elsewhere in Fermanagh, billboard-sized pictures of the gorgeous scenery have been located to mask the occasional stark and abandoned building site or other eyesore.

Recession out of the picture as Fermanagh puts on a brave face for G8 leaders [Dan Keenan/Irish Times]

(via The Atlantic)

Usury in the UK

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:57:37 +0000

A UK Parliamentary committee blasted the Office of Fair Trading -- a consumer watchdog agency that is supposed to regulate moneylenders -- for doing effectively nothing to curb the growth of usurious, predatory moneylenders who attack poor and vulnerable people. There are 72,000 consumer credit firms in the UK, some chargin annual interest rates of 4,000%, but the OFT has never fined a single firm for breaking lending rules. On some rare occasions, it did shut down firms, but did nothing to stop them from reopening immediately under another name.

This week the charity Citizens Advice said it knew of cases where loans had been given to under-18s, to people with mental health issues, and to people who were drunk at the time of securing the loan. One client who took out a £50 loan was targeted with emails and texts offering more cash and ended up with debts of £800.
"Some of these lenders use predatory techniques to target vulnerable people on low incomes, encouraging them to take out loans which when rolled over with extra interest rapidly become out of control debts," the committee's chair, Margaret Hodge, said. "Meanwhile, the OFT has been ineffective and timid in the extreme. It passively waits for complaints from consumers before acting."
PAC's report said the OFT lacked information on how much lending was being done by each firm, and about how different people used consumer credit. A study commissioned from the National Audit Office suggested the scale of consumer harm was at least £450m a year, but the OFT was accused of lacking detailed information on the types of harm suffered by different groups of borrowers.

OFT criticised over 'ineffectual' payday loans policing [Hilary Osborne/The Guardian]

(Image: La Danse macabre, Guy Marchant/Wikimedia Commons)

Today Show busts rent-a-disabled-guide/skip-the-lines services in Disneyland

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:40:32 +0000

Remember the New York Post story about disabled people renting themselves out to rich New York families in order to skip the lines at Walt Disney World?

The Today Show followed up on this, investigating the phenomenon of rent-a-disabled-guide services across the country in California's Disneyland. They found people advertising openly on Craigslist, offering to rent out their company and the use of their disabled pass. They sent an undercover crew out with one such guide, and then confronted her in the parking lot and asked her if she felt bad about abusing the system of disabled passes.

Disney has promised to crack down on the practice, threatening lifetime bans from the parks for anyone caught offering the use of their disabled passes.

On ads we found on Craigslist, tour guides brag about their disabled passes: "Let's cut the Disney lines together," "access to ... special entrances." So we had our producer and his family go undercover with home video cameras, hiring two of those disabled guides to show them around Disneyland.
First up was a guide named Mara, who said she got her pass after a car accident. "I'm here to make sure everyone has fun at Disneyland and we get on as many rides as possible," she told us.
"And you have a secret weapon that's going to help us?" our producer asked.
"I do. I have a special card that's going to help us beat the lines," Mara replied with a wink.
And she charged $50 an hour to do it. We started at the Mad Tea Party ride. The long line was no problem for us: We skipped ahead, and got right in through a side door.
Our second disabled guide, Ryan, charged our family $200 and got them right through another side door at Star Tours, an attraction inspired by "Star Wars." "I cant believe we're getting past everybody," our producer exclaimed.

Undercover at Disney: 'Deplorable' scheme to skip lines

Lessig: Democrats' policies are up for auction to highest bidder, too

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:04:30 +0000

Writing in The Atlantic, Larry Lessig reminds supporters of the Democratic Party that corruption isn't limited to the Republicans. The Dems, too, have a party where policy is driven by campaign donations rather than principle, evidence or even ideology.

This way of thinking about the "necessities" of modern political life is so obvious to mainstream Democrats that it follows the party whether it is in power or not. The Center for American Progress, for example, is the Democratic Party's most important Washington think tank. Its researchers have produced an incredible range of valuable work, mapping a progressive agenda for the party to follow. There is no better home for left-thinking policy wonks in D.C., and no more than a handful of institutions that have ever produced better left-leaning work.
Or at least, and possibly, depending upon whether it pays. For, as investigative journalists Ken Silverstein and Brooke Williams have documented in a series of recent articles, CAP's agenda is potentially vulnerable to a long list of undisclosed corporate funders. According to Silverstein, CAP staffers are "very clearly instructed to check with the think tank's development team before writing anything that might upset contributors." (CAP disputes Silverstein's portrayal.) In at least one case, CAP has acted as an undisclosed lobbyist for a corporate contributor. (Disclosure: Silverstein and Williams's work on think tanks has been funded in part by a research center I run.)
My point is not that these are bad people pushing bad policy. My point instead is just this: Democrats must recognize that we don't actually get very much from this bargain. Sure, we'll win some elections, including the presidency, and so a regular mix of not-right-leaning souls will have this democratic royalty bestowed upon them. But we won't get much actual policy. Or policy consistent with the principles of this party, if indeed there are any principles not yet auctioned off to big money.

Can Democrats Get a New Party, Too?

Toronto mayoral disaster: illegal deletion of staffers' email?

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 30 May 2013 16:01:34 +0000

More news from the embattled mayor of Toronto, Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford: after two of his senior staffers walked out on him following questioning by Toronto homicide detectives, it appears that someone illegally ordered the destruction of their archived city emails and call-records -- as well as the archived electronic communications of Ford's former chief of staff, whom Ford fired under mysterious circumstances.

The Star heard concerns at city hall Wednesday afternoon over the potential destruction or hiding of the records of three staffers who resigned or were fired during the ongoing crack cocaine scandal. Sources told the Star the records were in danger after city employees were directed to delete them.
The Star sent a request late Wednesday to the city asking for email and phone records of the three staffers in question for the time period during which the video at the heart of the scandal has been discussed.
Emails sent by city employees, including political staffers, are automatically preserved by the city, though emails related to “personal” business are exempt from freedom of information requests.
Two people familiar with the system said the emails of specific political staffers cannot be permanently erased from the system.p

Rob Ford video scandal: Concerns raised over safety of email records

Canadian PM Steven Harper mercilessly grilled over corruption in his office, senate, government and party

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 May 2013 17:21:43 +0000

If you're outside of Canada, you might not have heard about the expenses scandal rocking the government. A Conservative senator with a reputation as a killer Party fundraiser named Mike Duffy, appointed by the Prime Minister, was caught claiming $90,000 in fraudulent expenses from the government. Before the auditor could conclude a probe into Duffy's actions, Duffy repaid the sum and took the position that he was no longer obliged to cooperate with the audit. Then it emerged that the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had written a personal cheque for $90,000 to Duffy, allowing him to escape the probe and to continue to support PM Harper's policies in the Senate.

Now comes this: a grilling of the PM by the leader of the opposition, the NDP's Thomas Mulcair. It's a textbook example of how the opposition should call the government to question. As Joey DeVilla puts it:

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair did an excellent job grilling the Prime Minister by dealing with him as one would deal with a petulant adolescent who’s been caught lifting the scotch from the liquor cabinet: ask short, simple questions, and if the answers aren’t satisfactory, ask again. The video below shows the outcome: Mulcair does a killer job as our weaselly Prime Minister dodges, weaves, misdirects, and like that petulant adolescent, wishes he could tell Mommy and Daddy to “eff off”, but for all his vainglorious claims to being the boss of himself, can’t.

In Which Thomas Mulcair Takes the Prime Minister Behind the Shed for a Much-Needed Spanking

UK film industry requisitions cops for massive raid on suspected pirate, get to question him at police station

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 May 2013 15:40:10 +0000

In the UK, the movie industry's lobby group gets to requisition huge numbers of police officers to raid peoples' houses, solely on their say-so. Here's the story of one man who was raided by ten cops, who arrived in five cars, along with representatives from FACT (the horribly named Federation Against Copyright Theft). The FACT agents directed the arrest of a 24-year-old man, along with the seizure of all his computers and storage media, on the basis of an "emergency" search-warrant. The FACT agents conducted the bulk of his questioning at the police station, with the cops acting as stenographers. When the man was bailed, the bail sheet specified that he had been arrested for a "miscellaneous offense." He has been banned from entering any cinemas in England or Wales as a condition of bail.

As TorrentFreak notes, FACT offers cash bounties to cinema workers who disrupt people thought to be "cammers" who are recording movies in cinemas. They paid more than a dozen such bounties last year, but did not have a single successful prosecution.

“This morning I was arrested at my home under suspicion of recording and distributing Fast and Furious 6 and a few other titles,” the arrested man told TorrentFreak. Mp> After seizing numerous items including three servers, a desktop computer, blank hard drives and blank media, police detained the 24-year-old and transported him to a nearby police station. Despite the ‘emergency’ nature of the raid, no movie recording equipment was found.
“At the police station I was interviewed by the police together with FACT (Federation Against Copyright and Theft). During questioning they asked me about Fast and Furious 6, where I obtained a copy from and if I was the one who went and recorded it at the cinema.”
Despite police involvement, as in previous cases it appears they were only present in order to gain access to the victim’s property, sit on the sidelines taking notes, and for their powers when it comes to presenting crimes for prosecution.
“I was detained for 3 hrs 12 minutes, out of that I was questioned for approximately 40 minutes. One police officer and two FACT officers conducted the interview. The police officer sat back and let FACT do all the questioning, so FACT were running the show,” the man reports.

Five Undercover Police Cars Sent To Arrest Single Alleged Movie Pirate [Andy/TorentFreak]

Canada's business groups wants to hack your computer even more than the creeps at the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 May 2013 22:09:06 +0000

Michael Geist writes,

The Internet is buzzing over a new report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property that recommends using spyware and ransomware to combat online infringement. The recommendations are shocking as they represent next-generation digital locks that could lock down computers and even "retrieve" files from personal computers:
"Software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user's computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account."
While many of the recommendations sound outrageous, it is worth noting that earlier this year Canadian business groups led by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce recommended that the Canadian government introduce a regulation that would permit the use of spyware for these kinds of purposes.
The proposed regulation would remove the need for express consent for:
"a program that is installed by or on behalf of a person to prevent, detect, investigate, or terminate activities that the person reasonably believes (i) present a risk or threatens the security, privacy, or unauthorized or fraudulent use, of a computer system, telecommunications facility, or network, or (ii) involves the contravention of any law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada or of a foreign state;"
This provision would effectively legalize spyware in Canada on behalf of these industry groups. The potential scope of coverage is breathtaking: a software program secretly installed by an entertainment software company designed to detect or investigate alleged copyright infringement would be covered by this exception. This exception could potentially cover programs designed to block access to certain websites (preventing the contravention of a law as would have been the case with SOPA), attempts to access wireless networks without authorization, or even keylogger programs tracking unsuspecting users (detection and investigation).

The Canadian Link to Copyright Enforcement Spyware Tools

UK Ministry of Justice denies that the court system is to be sold to hedge funds

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 May 2013 16:09:33 +0000

The UK Ministry of Justice has denied a report in The Times that claimed the courts were to be privatised and paid for henceforth through hedge fund investments made in anticipation of high court fees extracted from wealthy litigants.

While confirming that civil servants are looking at ways of improving the efficiency of the HM Courts & Tribunal Service (HMCTS), the MoJ denied that it planned to outsource all court buildings to a private contractor.
Responding late on Monday night to claims that a sale was actively being considered, an MoJ spokesperson stated: "We have always said we are determined to deliver a courts system that is more effective and efficient and provides improved services for victims and witnesses. The proposals being considered are not the wholesale privatisation of the courts service.
"We are committed to the firm, fair and independent administration of justice."

MoJ denies it has plans for privatisation of courts service

Kafka, meet Orwell: peek behind the scenes of the modern surveillance state

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 19:00:19 +0000

Journeyman Pictures' short documentary "Naked Citizens" is an absolutely terrifying and amazing must-see glimpse of the modern security state, and the ways in which it automatically ascribes guilt to people based on algorithmic inferences, and, having done so, conducts such far-reaching surveillance into its victims' lives that the lack of anything incriminating is treated of proof of being a criminal mastermind:

"I woke up to pounding on my door", says Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Humboldt University. In what felt like a scene from a movie, he was taken from his Berlin home by armed men after a systematic monitoring of his academic research deemed him the probable leader of a militant group. After 30 days in solitary confinement, he was released without charges. Across Western Europe and the USA, surveillance of civilians has become a major business. With one camera for every 14 people in London and drones being used by police to track individuals, the threat of living in a Big Brother state is becoming a reality. At an annual conference of hackers, keynote speaker Jacob Appelbaum asserts, "to be free of suspicion is the most important right to be truly free". But with most people having a limited understanding of this world of cyber surveillance and how to protect ourselves, are our basic freedoms already being lost?

World - Naked Citizens (Thanks, Dan!)

Obama's trade reps and the MPAA are killing a copyright treaty that gives rights to disabled people

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 00:50:17 +0000

Jim Fruchterman, founder of the NGO Benetech, writes in frustration from the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, where the US Trade Representative is scuttling a treaty that will help blind people and people with other disabilities access copyrighted works, largely by making the (actually rather good) US laws the standard around the world.

Rather than promoting the US approach -- which allows for the creation of works in accessible formats without permission -- the US Trade Rep and his friends from the MPAA are advocating for a treaty that is far more restrictive than US law, ensuring that the US itself could never sign it.

In the process, they're killing a badly needed project to help people with disabilities around the world help each other to access creative works in formats that are adapted for their use.

To give you an idea of the poison pills being advocated for by the MPAA, publishers, and now the U.S. trade delegation, I've outlined the most notable ones below:
1. Commercial Availability Requirements. This poison pill says that if a book is commercially available in an accessible format, it can't be provided by a library to a person with a disability. This is equivalent to walking into a public library and finding padlocks on all the books with a note that says: "If you want to read it, buy it." With a commercial availability requirement, libraries like Bookshare, with hundreds of thousands of accessible books available to people with print disabilities, would have to go through such complex bureaucracy that we couldn't afford to serve people outside the U.S. under a Treaty. The World Blind Union's lead negotiator pointed out how these provisions would, in practice, stop Bookshare from serving blind people in India.
2. The "Three-Step Test" Chokehold. The three-step test is part of international copyright law meant to allow countries to reflect their own values in their copyright exceptions. The United States' copyright exception for the blind is a shining example of something that complies with the three-step test. So what are the negotiators trying to do? They are working to alter the very meaning of the three-step test, changing the language of the test to the point of which it will put a chokehold on a country's ability to make broader exceptions to copyrights. Which leads to #3.
3. Conflicts with American Law. Simply put--the US won't sign it. Our trade delegation is now advocating for a Treaty that would require, if ratified, the U.S. Congress to gut our model copyright exception. Essentially, the Treaty would be too poisonous for the U.S. to swallow. It's clear to everyone that if we couldn't even get the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which was pretty much identical to our own Americans with Disabilities Act, ratified by the Senate, a poisoned Treaty for the Blind has no chance of ratification.

Poisoning the Treaty for the Blind

US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to attack pirates!

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 26 May 2013 18:41:03 +0000

The hilariously named "Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property" has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But amidst all that crazy, there's a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware.

It's just more evidence that copyright enforcers' network strategies are indistinguishable from those used by dictators and criminals. In 2011, the MPAA told Congress that they wanted SOPA and knew it would work because it was the same tactic used by governments in "China, Iran, the UAE, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam." Now they've demanded that Congress legalize an extortion tool invented by organized criminals.

Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.

It gets better:

While not currently permitted under U.S. law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defense that allows companies not only to stabilize a situation but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder’s networks, or even destroying the information within an unauthorized network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system’s camera, implanting malware in the hacker’s network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker’s own computer or network.

USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission Recommends Malware! (Thanks, Adam!)

(Image: [211/365] Off with her head!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pasukaru76's photostream)

Independent Brewers United says they own sixes and nines

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:00:26 +0000

Magic Hat IP, LLC and Independent Brewers United Corporation filed a remarkably spurious trademark lawsuit against West Sixth Brewery in Lexington, KY. Ben sez:

The suit alleges that West Sixth's own logo, which is a "6" within a circle, infringes upon its trademarked "#9" mark and is "directing Defendant West Sixth to account for and to pay over to Magic Hat all profits realized by West Sixth as a result of its use of the 6 Marks, its infringement of MagicHat's trademarks and trade dress, and its acts of unfair competition" as part of the awards it seeks from this suit.
Magic Hat is owned by North American Breweries, a large, multinational corporation that produces and imports several different brands of beer. West Sixth, on the other hand, is a local startup started about a year ago that strives to give back to its own community through financial donations, environmental stewardship, and community activities, many of which are free for attendees.

Brewer Magic Hat files federal lawsuit against West Sixth Brewing

Chronology of the Canadian Conservative government's war on science

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:07:03 +0000

No government in Canadian history has been as hostile to science as Stephen Harper's Conservatives. John Dupuis has assembled a brief, brutal chronology of the ways that the Tories have attacked Canadian science. It's no coincidence that this government is so hostile to science, seeing as how its funding and grassroots support come from the tar sands and related Big Oil interests, who want as little known as possible about the impact of their dirty industry on the planet we all share.

This is a brief chronology of the current Conservative Canadian government’s long campaign to undermine evidence-based scientific, environmental and technical decision-making. It is a government that is beholden to big business, particularly big oil, and that makes every attempt to shape public policy to that end. It is a government that fundamentally doesn’t believe in science. It is a government that is more interested in keeping its corporate masters happy than in protecting the environment.
As is occasionally my habit, I have pulled together a chronology of sorts. It is a chronology of all the various cuts, insults, muzzlings and cancellations that I’ve been able to dig up. Each of them represents a single shot in the Canadian Conservative war on science. It should be noted that not every item in this chronology, if taken in isolation, is necessarily the end of the world. It’s the accumulated evidence that is so damning.

The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment (Thanks, John!)

(Image: US Tar Sands exploratory mission, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from beforeitstarts's photostream)