08.27.13
Posted in Law at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some of the latest self-explanatory stories about NSA abuses which are gradually embraced by politicians, corporations, and even state police; attempts to change the law to criminalise the acts of revealing these abuses
THE NSA‘S criminal activities are a phenomenon that keeps giving. Stories about it have been told for months and there’s no stopping it. Clever mechanisms like effective encryption inside chat and insurance files show just why the government hates encryption so much (not fake encryption which gives the mere illusion of privacy).
Some of the latest assorted story (below, not grouped by type) help reinforce the argument that terrorism — however one defines it –is not what the NSA fights against. The NSA is shown time after time to have engaged in strategic espionage, sometimes even inside the United States (where different rules apply).
This happens to coincide with media propaganda which tries to sell a war on Syria to the public (the war inside Syria has already been shown to be at least partly fuelled by the CIA). The UN is doing what it did 11 years ago in Iraq, trying to identify if there are weapons of mass destruction which merit invasion by other nations and now we know that the UN was among the victims of espionage (by the NSA). Moreover, recall US attempts to ban encryption in Syria (desperate and futile measures targeting FOSS repositories). This helps show the massive power of the NSA, which can also start wars. Jacob Appelbaum was right about it. In the wake of site shutdowns it is said in relation to Groklaw that:
Internet surveillance must be stopped or rendered ineffective with encryption
Yes, but laws are being passed to criminalise some anonymisation tactics. Other laws are now being proposed in the UK for criminalising reports about the NSA. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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America’s National Security Agency has been hit by fresh allegations of spying after Germany’s Der Spiegel accused it of illegally spying on the UN in New York for a year.
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Agents succeeded in getting into the UN video conferencing system and cracking its coding, according to leaked secret documents.
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Peer Steinbrück says he will delay negotiations until US comes clean on bugging of German government offices
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Research shows that indiscriminate monitoring fosters distrust, conformity and mediocrity
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New details about innocent Americans targeted for surveillance by undercover officers.
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EU could make solid data protection regulations, but in the midst of debates it is becoming obvious that European political leaders aren’t willing to take serious steps in this direction, an MEP from the Swedish Pirate Party, Amelia Andersdotter, told RT.
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World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers tells the UK government its actions could threaten press freedom
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged the United Nations’ New York headquarters, Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on US spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies.
Citing secret US documents obtained by fugitive former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel said the files showed how the United States systematically spied on other states and institutions.
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The NSA paid millions to compensate companies’ surveillance costs, new documents claim
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US fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden stayed in Moscow in late June and did not fly to Cuba because Cuban authorities would have denied him landing under US pressure, Russian newspaper Kommersant reports.
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Acting in collaboration with the CIA, the daily claims that a “Special Collection Service-Team” makes use of equipment installed on the roof of the Vienna embassy to intercept communications, and in particular communications from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Neither the IAEA, or the Austrian Ministry of the Interior were willing to confirm this information…
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Most of the focus on NSA surveillance has been the domestic fallout from the Obama Administration spying on ordinary Americans and then lying repeatedly about it. The international fallout is significant, however, with key US allies like Germany and Brazil taking the revelation of systematically being targeted poorly.
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Public outrage over the federal government’s surveillance programs reached a fever pitch last week, with revelations that the National Security Administration illegally collected tens of thousands of non-terrorism-related emails from U.S. citizens, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. With no end to the NSA bombshells in sight, at least some members of Congress appear to have grudgingly accepted that they are going to have to do something about the government’s expansive spying programs.
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On July 30, 2013, I had the pleasure of having dinner with General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency. Just a few weeks earlier, NYU Law Professor Christopher Sprigman and I had called the NSA’s activities “criminal” in the digital pages of the New York Times, so I thought it was particularly gracious of him to sit with me.
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Liberty and security are the hard-won results of democratic process and limited government power. A system of mass surveillance puts innocent people at risk, and is, in itself, an abuse of liberty. Inevitably, it leads to further abuses. When the justification is counter-terrorism, and that’s your only concern, there is no countervailing interest that justifies slowing you down or stopping you. We are only beginning to learn all the ways in which good men are nevertheless failing to withstand the corrupting force of vast spying abilities. Indeed, the FISA court noted in that 2011 opinion that the government’s collection of tens of thousands of purely domestic communications, hidden from the court for years, could be a crime. (Footnote 15) The good people at NSA have literally pulverized the Fourth Amendment, government accountability, freedom of expression, rule of law, and so many other equally critical components of the American system.
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The NSA whistleblower says: ‘I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent’
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Anti-terror laws should be strengthened to prevent leaks of official secrets, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Blair has told the BBC.
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The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prove the NSA spied on internal communications at the United Nations headquarters in New York City during the summer of 2012. The NSA has also targeted the European Union and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to Der Spiegel .
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Companies have an appetite for GNU/Linux and FOSS talent, suggest some new data points
As one who works exclusively with GNU/Linux (even at my daytime job) I can attest to the experience of relative security when your skills go beyond using Microsoft Windows and Office. Based on three new articles (see below [1-3]), not just a personal anecdote supports this seemingly optimistic claim. It sure seems like despite economic pains there are good job prospects for those who master the already-dominant and ever-growing platform.
“This is the spirit of innovation and this is where innovation is typically derived from.”As [4,5] help show, more startups like Google use GNU/Linux to get started and expand to large scale. So even those who are not in the workforce of others (contracted) can do their own thing with little initial capital. This is the spirit of innovation and this is where innovation is typically derived from. It also contributes to personal and professional freedom. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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For the last couple of years, the HostGator billboards have been all over the place.
“Do you know Linux…? We are hiring.
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If you want a tech job, you want to be in Linux and open source software. Because that’s where the employers are slathering to find qualified personnel. And they want you.
There I was, at perhaps the biggest hard-core, open source conference of them all these days, OSCon. The buzz was that everyone, and I mean everyone, was looking to hire. So I thought to myself, “Are they really?” I set about asking every OSCon exhibitor, more than a hundred of them, if they were indeed looking for new staff and ready to make job offers.
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Smartbear.com says employers are chomping at the bit to hire people with Linux and open source skills.
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This is pretty insane. A group of Silicon Valley-based Linux hackers are crafting a new operating system, not for personal computers, or smartphones, or even tablets, but for the servers that underpin the entire internet.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Fraud, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
And prison sentences, too
Summary: What really would have happened if there was justice in this world; bankrupt Microsoft, executives with long jail sentences, rapid restoration of fair competition
Microsoft is pretty much forced to ‘cooperate” with a probe over its bribery tactics, which Microsoft is seemingly trying to hide by distraction. To quote The Register, “Microsoft says it will cooperate with US investigators probing alleged bribery of foreign officials. It’s claimed Redmond’s resellers bunged cash to apparatchiks in Russia and Pakistan in return for contracts with state-backed businesses.”
As Pogson put it:
Ever wondered why M$ manages to sell licences to all kinds of folks even when GNU/Linux is a better option, with a lower price, better performance and fewer problems? It just may be that big businesses, governments, schools, and organizations that have large numbers of system, are being manipulated by a few well-placed bribes.
Remember EDGI and remember what Microsoft did to government and schools in Russia. It is a serious case of corruption, even by Chinese and Russian standards.
As put by Nokia observer Tomi Ahonen the othe day, “I have tried to be ‘fair’ and ‘open-minded’ about Microsoft in my writing and on this blog. However, this is the tech company with the nickname ‘The Evil Empire’. That term comes with plenty of cause – over the past three decades Microsoft has been fined countless times huge sums for crushing competitors with illegal methods, using its monopolistic position like a bully. I personally have been a user, supporter, registered developer, and/or authorized trainer for many of the various victims of Microsoft from WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 to Novell Netware, Mosaic and Netscape.”
Here is part 2. Microsoft apologists may say that “Ballmer Successor Must Apologize to Partners”, but we don’t agree. Microsoft should apologise and also compensate its rivals which it bribed against, even if that means the immediate bankruptcy of Microsoft (they should pull out more money — earned by criminal activities — from bank accounts of Microsoft executives past and present, including Gates and Ballmer).
Sadly, given false (or mutually similar) choices offered by the corporate media, this perfectly legitimate option is rendered “not worth entertaining”; big banks show this to be the norm. Those who commit crime, even if caught, are made the richest and most powerful people, hence they can continue to harm society and whitewash their reputation. █
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Posted in Patents at 2:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Net worth of $27 billion
Summary: ‘Intellectual property’ boosters like Bloomberg and proponents of the notion of “bad software patents” (implying some are “good”) may still be rewriting the record while patents continue to limit competition, the real driver of innovation
The recent GAO study showed that Obama's patent reform is rather misguided. Bloomberg’s press apparatus continues to misrepresent it. GAO speaks of “Software Patents”, not “Questionable Software Patents” (which can mean a subset of them) and this is something that we see a lot of when it comes to sites that favour software patents. Here is how it’s put in this case:
Questionable Software Patents Lead to More Lawsuits: GAO
Software patents are the biggest reason behind a rise in litigation over inventions, especially against companies that use the technology, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found.
So why the headline? It’s clearly software patents that were blamed, so why rephrase it? Why not preserve the original message? Other lawyers too tried to paint the culprit as “bad patents”, as we showed the other day. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, as some are funded by investors of trolls like Vringo.
Here is another new article from lawyers-friendy press. Citing an old ruling from CAFC, it once again tries to dismiss interpretations that said many software patents had died. The headline said that the Federal court is ‘foggy’ on patent software issues, even though — as we showed at the time — this is not quite the case. Patent lawyers’ sites tried to control — and successfully did so — the corporate press. They made it seem like consensus said nothing had changed, even though a precedent was made that can invalidate hundreds of thousands of software patents, including some of the latest spooky ideas from Google (tracking users for ‘security’).
It is being noted right now that it is becoming hard to enter the market because of abundance of patents. As Against Monopoly put it:
The other day, the New York Times published instructions for aspiring inventors on how to take their inventions through the patent granting process and on to the retailers’ shelves link here. The examples are a couple of aspiring inventors and describes the pitfalls, the costs, and a rough estimate of the likelihood of success.
Patent laws in the US — like its Draconian copyright laws (see new example below) — are certainly not helping the US economy. But it helps the ecosystem of lawyers, that’s for sure. The problem is that they control the press on these matters and distort public opinion.
It is not unusual for patent law to be misrepresented by opportunists, exploiting ambiguity such as the phrase “as such” (in New Zealand and Europe) to make software patents possible while officially denying that’s the case. Right now in India we see that happening, as a room for misinterpretation is left to legitimise software patents in India. Murdoch’s press makes it look like software patents are now possible in India. To quote a new WSJ report (another billionaire’s press):
Could the simple Latin phrase, per se, which translates as “in itself”, lead to confusion in verifying whether a computer-related invention deserves a patent or not? Some members of the $108 billion Indian information technology industry, intellectual property (IP) law firms and anti-patent lobby groups say it can.
The inclusion of some terms that are not defined by local laws in the government’s draft guidelines on patents for computer-related inventions (CRIs) leaves room for ambiguity and misinterpretation when examiners grant or reject such a patent, they say. The guidelines were released in early August.
The terms include ‘per se’, algorithm, hardware, firmware —and CRI itself.
CRI “has not been defined in any of the Indian statutes and is construed to mean, for the purpose of these guidelines, any invention which involves the use of computers, computer networks or other programmable apparatus and includes such inventions, one or more features of which are realized wholly or partially by means of a computer programme/programmes”, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) acknowledged in the draft guidelines, and called for feedback from industry stakeholders by 8 August.
Actually, India has been very clear on this subject. Software patents are not allowed. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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If you read Techdirt, you’re almost certainly familiar with Larry Lessig, the law professor at Harvard who (among many other things) has been an avid advocate for copyright reform and campaign finance reform, an author of many books about copyright and creativity, a well-known public speaker whose presentations are stunningly compelling, entertaining and informative, and the founder of some important organizations including Creative Commons. Of course, as an expert on copyright and creativity, and someone who’s actually been involved in some of the key copyright legal fights over the past decade (tragically, on the losing side), you might think that a record label would think twice before issuing a clearly bogus threat to sue him over copyright infringement. Well, apparently Liberation Music was either unaware of Lessig’s reputation and knowledge, or just didn’t care.
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