Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance: Via Threat Level.

Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the U.S.

The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.

Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S. government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the government to spy on internet users.  read more »

The Illegal Spying Game, played over and over: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

Ever since The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had spent the last four years illegally spying on Americans' communications without warrants, there have been numerous additional revelations of various types of massive illegal government spying.  Yesterday's New York Times article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- reporting that "recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged" -- is but the latest such revelation.  Congress never does anything about these revelations other than enact new laws that increase the government's spying powers still further and gut the few remaining oversight mechanisms that exist (while immunizing the lawbreakers).  All of that compels the conclusion that Congress -- regardless of which party controls it -- is either indifferent to or in favor of this unchecked illegal government spying.  What other conclusion could a rational person possibly reach?  read more »

How the west built Iran's 'lawful intercept functionality' : Via Technology | guardian.co.uk .  read more »

ISPs must help police snoop on internet under new bill: Via Canadian Broadcasting Centre.

Internet service providers would have to make it possible for police and intelligence officers to intercept online communications and get personal information about subscribers under bills tabled Thursday.  read more »

The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany: Via netzpolitik.org .

Germany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.  read more »

BT wants BBC to pay-up for iPlayer: Via PC Pro: News.

BT is tired of the BBC and other video sites getting a "free ride" on its networks.
Last week a row erupted between BT and the BBC, after it emerged that BT was choking iPlayer streams on some of its broadband packages, which the broadcaster said was hurting viewers' ability to watch television online.

John Petter, managing director of BT Retail's consumer business, has now accused the BBC of getting a "free ride".

"We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect," he told the Financial Times, adding it wasn't only the BBC that was the burden, but any sites offering streaming video.  read more »

A New List of How Much AT&T Knows About You: Via Bits Blog - NYTimes.com .

These days AT&T knows a great deal about its customers: who they call, where they travel, what they watch on TV, what sites they visit on the Web. It has taken a new shot at explaining to them what information it collects and why in a new privacy policy that it posted Thursday morning. The policy is a draft that in 45 days will replace the 17 policies now used by its various subsidiaries.

I can hear the chorus of yawns and wisecracks already.

Privacy policies are typically little more than boilerplate that have very little to do with protecting people’s privacy or even giving them useful information to help them understand which companies to do business with. But AT&T has decided that appearing to take the high ground on privacy will help it in Washington in its battle with Google, and perhaps will improve its image among those who are angry about its cooperation with the government’s warrantless wiretapping program.  read more »

EFF Challenges Government's 'Back Door Wiretap': Via EFF.org Updates.

Cincinnati - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups filed an amicus brief in Warshak v. United States urging the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday to hold that the government's seizure of email without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and federal privacy statutes, as well as the Justice Department's own surveillance manual.

During its criminal investigation, the Department of Justice illegally ordered defendant Stephen Warshak's email provider to prospectively "preserve" copies of his future emails, which the government later obtained using a subpoena and a non-probable cause court order. The government accomplished this "back door wiretap" by misusing the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which is only supposed to be used for obtaining emails already in storage with a provider.  read more »

Email Privacy Rights, Electroinc Search and Seizure Before Court: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

CDT recently signed on to an amicus brief being spearheaded by Electronic Frontier Foundation in the second round of United States v. Warshak, a case that could have major ramifications for email privacy rights and electronic search and seizure processes. The court is deciding whether the government can evade probable cause standards through the use of mandatory data preservation requests.  read more »

France Declares Three Strikes Unconstitutional: Via EFF.org Updates.

Before legislation becomes law in France, it must pass the muster of the Conseil Constitutionnel: a group of jurists who determine whether each new law is consistent with the principles and rules of France's constitution.

For the passage of Sarkozy's unpopular "three strikes" HADOPI legislation, the approval of the Conseil was the final hurdle to cross. If the council had approved the law, rightsholders in France would have been able to cast French citizens off the Internet with no judicial oversight, simply by alleging to the new HADOPI administrative body that they were repeat copyright infringers. These citizens would then have their names added to a national Internet blacklist for up to a year, and ISPs would be subject to financial penalties if they gave these exiles access to the Internet.  read more »

China's Spy in the Home: Via EFF.org Updates.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and IT's announcement that all PCs sold in China must include government-approved filtering software is a profoundly worrying development for online privacy and free speech in that country. While the application, "Green Dam Youth Escort", claims to only block pornographic sites, the access to a home computer such filtering software requires means that it could also have the power to conduct all sorts of other surveillance and control — far more than China's current monitoring and blocking systems at the ISP level permits.

On present day operating systems, government-controlled software that are granted such admin rights would be able to collect IM and email conversations, install keyloggers, relay microphone and webcam recordings.  read more »

Feds Shutter ‘Black Hat’ ISP: Via Threat Level.

For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission is shuttering an internet service provider it alleges, “recruits, knowingly hosts, and actively participates in the distribution of illegal, malicious and harmful electronic content” such as botnets and child porn.

The company, doing business as 3fn.net and APS Telecom, “actively recruited” to its hosting service thousands of “rouge” and “black hat” web sites distributing “illegal, malicious, and harmful electronic content including child pornography, spyware, viruses, trojan horses, phishing, botnet command and control servers, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest. ”

A San Jose, California federal judge, responding to the FTC’s lawsuit, has ordered (.pdf) upstream internet providers and data centers to stop servicing the company, also known as Pricewert, which is based in Oregon. Itss operators  live in Belize.

The company had thousands of servers in the San Jose area.  read more »

Cloud Computing: Via Schneier on Security.

This year's overhyped IT concept is cloud computing. Also called software as a service (Saas), cloud computing is when you run software over the internet and access it via a browser. The Salesforce.com customer management software is an example of this. So is Google Docs. If you believe the hype, cloud computing is the future.

But, hype aside, cloud computing is nothing new . It's the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It's what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it's social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing -- network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting -- is a form of cloud computing.  read more »

Chinese voices silenced (again) as Tiananmen media blackout begins: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

The Chinese government has blocked access to Twitter and a slew of other online platforms for expression in China on Tuesday. Users report that Twitter, Flickr, Bing.com, Hotmail, Windows Live, Blogger.com, and other services are unavailable. YouTube has also been largely blocked since March.

The Chinese government often restricts access to online services during politically sensitive periods. As this week marks the twentieth anniversary of the deadly crackdown on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, “politically sensitive” would be an immense understatement in describing the tension in Beijing and permeating the rest of the mainland.

The Chinese government has been here before:   read more »

China Censors: The Tiananmen Square Anniversary Will Not Be Tweeted: Via Threat Level.

Chinese authorities have instituted censoring measures to block access to several internet sites and services in anticipation of Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre.

The censoring began at 5 p.m. local time on Tuesday as access to sites was blocked, though users could still reportedly reach some of them through proxies, VPNs and third-party desktop clients.  read more »

Odds are Stacked Against Minnesota’s Bet on Web Blocking: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

Recently the Minnesota Department of Public Safety sent a seven-page list of off-shore gambling websites to 11 ISPs demanding that all access to those sites by state residents be blocked. This misguided action by the MDPS to scrub the Internet of websites it objects to is purportedly based on Federal law; however, the law cited in the letters doesn’t apply to ISPs or their customers’ access to remote websites. More broadly, like Kentucky’s recent attempt to seize domain names, this kind of state interference with the Internet raises substantial constitutional concerns.  read more »

NebuAD Officially Closes: Via PogoWasRIght - Privacy News Headlines.

Back in February of last year when we interviewed former NebuAD CEO Bob Dykes, the company was optimistic that they were at the crest of a fortune in behavioral advertising income. NebuAD had struck early trial arrangements with dozens of ISPs, who let NebuAD insert hardware on their networks that would track user behavior down to the minute spent at each site, allowing the company to then target those users with interest-tailored advertisements.  read more »

NebuAd shuts up shop, web users rejoice: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

NebuAd, the company that thought slurping up ISP data to better target ads was a good idea, has closed. Court documents filed this week in a class-action claim brought against the company show that NebuAd laid off most staff last year and now pays only a skeleton crew to wind things down in an orderly fashion.

The basic scheme was simple: pay ISPs for the privilege of inserting a box into their networks, grab URLs that customers visited, then mine them and assign users to interest categories.  read more »

BBC not sure whether to block Phorm: Via PC Pro(UK).

The BBC says the "jury is still out" on whether it will join websites such as Amazon and Wikipedia in blocking Phorm.

The controversial advertising service tracks the websites its users visit in order to build "anonymous" profiles of their online behaviour. Those profiles are then used to serve up adverts that match the user's habits.

The controller of BBC Online, Seetha Kumar, describes Phorm's technology as much more "invasive" than those which track users via cookies, because "it collects the user's entire web activity".  read more »

Do We Want ISP's Penalizing Music Fans?: Via Slashdot: Your Rights Online.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Noted singer songwriter Billy Bragg has written an excellent column in The Guardian, coming out against the pro-RIAA '3-strikes' legislation the big 4 record labels are trying to push through. In the article, entitled 'Do we want ISP's penalizing our fans?', Bragg writes:  read more »

Web designer opposes France's "3 strikes" law, loses job: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

He's already being called "le premier martyr d'Hadopi." Who is he? He's a 31-year old Frenchman named Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, and he works in the Internet innovation division of French TV broadcaster TF1. After sending a private note to his MP opposing the proposed "three strikes" law currently being debated in France, Bourreau-Guggenheim found himself hauled into his boss' office. He was shown a copy of his e-mail, and he was fired for "strategic differences" with his employer.  read more »

BT blocks off Pirate Bay: Via PC Pro(UK).

BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay, as part of a "self-regulation" scheme.

BT Mobile Broadband users who attempt to access the notorious BitTorrent tracker site are met with a "content blocked" message.

The warning page states the page has been blocked in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code".  read more »

Internet billing plan is put off: Via Winston-Salem Journal:.

Triad was to be test market for Time Warner Cable's tiered-consumption system

Time Warner Cable has shelved its plans for a consumption-based Internet pricing structure, but the company said it may return to the idea in the future.

The Triad was to be one of four test markets for the plan, which was to start this fall. The announcement of the plan was met with complaints from consumers and government officials, who said that it would stifle creative growth on the Internet. Some bloggers also speculated that the plan was part of a scheme to discourage people from watching streaming videos online rather than watching Time Warner Cable on television, which Time Warner officials denied.  read more »

CDT Urges FCC to Avoid Filtering and Other Mandates: Via Center for Democracy and Technology.

CDT yesterday filed two set of comments with the Federal Communications Commission in response to the Child Safe Viewing Act, in which Congress asked the FCC to assess tools to help parents guide their children's television and content viewing. In joint comments filed on behalf of a coalition of industry and public interest groups, as well as in individual comments for CDT, we argued that the FCC must avoid technical and other mandates that harm innovation and violate constitutional free speech principles. The goal, CDT urged the FCC, is to allow parents to make decisions for their families, and not have the government or a network operator deciding what is "good" or "bad" content.  read more »

We had a short network outage during lunch(Eastern-USA) today. It was not an attack on us but a problem with the router at the hosting company I use. Things look to be back in shape and will hopefully stay that way.

Paul