Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

11.21.15

EPO: It’s Like a Family Business – Part IV

Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 9:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gilles Requena visitSummary: Some more background information about Elodie Bergot and Gilles Requena, who are married whilst also sharing positions of power at the EPO (and also strong connections/ties with the EPO’s President, Mr. Battistelli); Rumours afloat at the EPO — some with ever-increasing circulation too — are worth noting

THE EPO is not an ordinary institution. It professes professionalism and public service, but it’s hard to take all that at face value. In part one, part two and part three of this series we have shown how Elodie Bergot, who is married to Battistelli’s assistant, got magically promoted. When the staff expressed shock the response from Team Battistelli was that some process which wasn’t even transparent was certain to assure the integrity of this promotion. Readers can make their own judgment and draw conclusions (if any) based on what we showed, but today we provide some more background about Gilles Requena.

“Mr. Requena previously worked under Battistelli when the latter was the Director General of the French National Institute for Intellectual Property (INPI). Mr. Requena joined the EPO in October 2010, a few months after Battistelli had taken up his duties as President of the EPO on the 1st of July, 2010.”The husband of Ms. Bergot is Mr. Gilles Requena, who is a close assistant of Battistelli. Mr. Requena previously worked under Battistelli when the latter was the Director General of the French National Institute for Intellectual Property (INPI). Mr. Requena joined the EPO in October 2010, a few months after Battistelli had taken up his duties as President of the EPO on the 1st of July, 2010.

Requena frequently accompanies Battistelli on his globe-trotting expeditions to the Intellectual Property Offices of the member states of the EPO and elsewhere:

Gilles Requena visitHere he can be seen as a member of the Presidential entourage during a “state visit” to Liechtenstein. That’s where the image on the right is cropped from.

The photo on this Web page was taken during a visit to the IPO of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. An English version of the accompanying text is available at the same site. This is the source of the image on the left. It’s publicly accessible, hence not a violation of privacy.

When you work for a private company of which you are founder, CEO or whatever, hiring a friend or family may generally be dubious (frowned upon by staff) but not inherently offensive; when you do this in the public sector, however, you have a responsibility to the public (you already enjoy a monopoly), so hiring should be done solely in the interests of the public. That’s why people in such positions are typically referred to as “public servants” — an ordinary and mundane term that Battistelli largely disgraced, especially when the context is the European Patent Office/Organisation.

Rumours

Now we enter rumourville and we ask readers to treat these as mere rumours. “In 2007,” we’ve learned. “Ms. Brimelow disclosed her working conditions when she joined the Office as President (including an approximate calculation of her salary in July 2007). In 2015 Mr. Battistelli disclosed the staff’s working conditions [but] Mr. Battistelli’s own contract still remains a well-guarded secret, known only to Mr. [Jesper] Kongstad and Mr. Archambeau (previously PD HR and now-Vice President at OHIM in Alicante). Evil tongues say that Ms. Bergot recently gave the President a 13% increase.”

The source “can neither confirm nor deny these rumours.” Since there is so much secrecy around it all, it’s not possible either. One can only guess based on hearsay. Battistelli likes to publicly brag about “transparency”, but his contract is perhaps an exclusion, among so many more exclusions. We have already learned that Battistelli was “asked — in vain — for his detailed earnings, including his salary, in an open letter” from SUEPO.

Mr. Requena and Ms. Bergot are not the only people from Battistelli’s ‘extended family’, so to speak. As one recent writing from SUEPO suggests:

Shortly after taking up office, Mr Battistelli put several of his previous co-workers at the French patent office (INPI) on key posts in the Office. A few months ago we flagged that the “inner circle” seemed to be growing, in particular around Elodie Bergot (PD4.3).

Our predictions are materializing. One of Ms Bergot’s personal assistants is Nadja Lefèvre. Ms Lefèvre joined the Office on 15.03.2014 as “Administrator A3” She was soon appointed head of “Administrative Services for Social Dialogue”, i.e. of the 100% staff representatives and secretaries. Next she was appointed head of “Conflict Resolution” a.i. Finally, in June of this year, “Internal Communication” was added to this already impressive work package. Since then a vacancy notice was published for a “Director HR Strategic Support and Change Management”. Only internal candidates may apply. The new Director “will manage a directorate… currently organised in 3 units: Internal Communication, Conflict Resolution Unit and Social Dialogue Administration”. We would be extremely surprised if the successful candidate were anyone other than Ms Lefèvre.

Nadja Lefèvre was mentioned here before, in relation to media spin and controversial interrogations [1, 2].

Minnoyal Double Standards

“Mr. Minnoye,” we’ve learned (the current VP1), “appears not to be amused that (DG1) documents are regularly leaking to the outside world.”

“The EPO likes selective transparency, which means making publicly available only the things that make the EPO look good while deliberately hiding the rest.”Well, when documents serve to prove irregularities it’s called whistleblowing and whistleblowers generally enjoy certain protections. It guards justice and ensures accountability within a self-serving system. The way to ensure that documents don’t regularly leak is to behave properly, in which case the leakers don’t qualify as whistleblowers. Sadly for Mr. Minnoye, there is a lot more to come. Trying to obstruct reporting isn’t a wise idea because the backlash it causes can be an order of magnitude greater than the perceived (and short-term) ‘gain’.

According to the EPO's own documents, accelerated examination for large ‘clients’ was the idea of Battistelli and VP1 (Minnoye). To quote EPO documents: “Both The President and VP1 have expressed the opinion that there needs to be closer contact between examiners and their applicants.”

It has also been alleged that Minnoye was involved in the next wave of propaganda, but we cannot confirm this for sure (no transparency at the EPO).

According to this new comment, “VP1″ (Minnoye) is hypocritical for bemoaning leaks. To quote the commenter: “That wouldn’t by any chance be the same VP1 who was allegedly involved in leaking the “facts” about a confidential internal investigation report to the Dutch press?”

Well, according to a letter from SUEPO: “A week before the Council meeting, Mr Minnoye (VP1), Ms Mittermaier (our new Dir. External Communication) and Mr Osterwalder (EPO press spokesman) apparently met with a journalist of the Financiele Dagblad.”

“To some people, truth itself is a considerable threat.”It’s becoming easy to see why Mr. Minnoye isn’t a big fan of this whole “transparency” thing which the President keeps boasting about. The EPO likes selective transparency, which means making publicly available only the things that make the EPO look good while deliberately hiding the rest.

Attempts to crack Techrights tripled this past week (an all-time high), with nearly a million attempts in just one week. It’s hard to tell who or what is behind it, but it sure limits access to the server as it’s a brute force attack. We do our best to counter this (thankfully, we have the technical skills and experience), but sometimes that is not enough. We remind readers to help protect the right to inform the public, as such rights should never be taken for granted. To some people, truth itself is a considerable threat. █

“We often forget to appreciate something until we lose it. It’s a fact of life. We tend to take a lot of things for granted. We take a lot of people for granted.”

–J. Angelo Racoma

Translation of Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann’s Article in the German Media, Urging European Politicians to Intervene in EPO Chaos and Lawlessness

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Frankfurt media

Summary: Frankfurt-based media presents an opinion piece written by a Munich-based economic correspondent, Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann

TECHRIGHTS would like to humbly thank all those who are sending translations to be shared with readers, many of whom appear to be patent attorneys, examiners, and so on (not the senders but the readers). There is clearly a lot of interest in EPO abuses and our coverage is driven to a large degree by our many sources.

Thomas Magenheim-HörmannThe last translation that we wish to release tonight is a column from Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann, who writes for a newspaper in Frankfurt. It seems as though a lot of press from Frankfurt is critical of the EPO’s management, due to many different reasons, including legal immunity which one truly struggles to grasp. That’s just such an outlandish thing! It should be a foreign concept in a civilised Germany, unless we’re back to post-Weimar Republic era (at least inside Eponia). As Magenheim-Hörmann puts it, “what has been happening there for at least two years under the aegis of President Benoît Battistelli is a legitimate cause for alarm.”

Magenheim-Hörmann states that the patent system is important but is unable to function. “The threshold of pain has now been reached,” he writes, “and the gulf between staff and management has never been so wide. Even slow learners must have finally realised that the Office is no longer capable of returning to normality under its own steam. European politicians now have another fire to fight and they need to intervene to extinguish it as a matter of urgency.”

This is all based on a reasonably accurate translation, which we provide in full below:

19th November 2015

Immediate action required to stop the fire

by Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann

Intellectual property is a cornerstone of modern economies and the European Patent Office in Munich one of its most important guardians. In this regard, what has been happening there for at least two years under the aegis of President Benoît Battistelli is a legitimate cause for alarm.

Editorial Comment

Intellectual property is a cornerstone of modern economies and the European Patent Office in Munich one of its most important guardians. In this regard, what has been happening there for at least two years under the aegis of President Benoît Battistelli is a legitimate cause for alarm. He is implementing a reform of this institution, the details of which have not been without controversy, but nevertheless something which is the daily business of a manager. The methods employed by the Frenchman are frequently blundering and he proceeds without regard for “collateral damage”. Now an entire staff union is to be cropped, something which would be impossible in Germany, all the more so given that the allegations seem to be fabricated.

“Now an entire staff union is to be cropped, something which would be impossible in Germany, all the more so given that the allegations seem to be fabricated.”But from a formal legal perspective, the Office is not subject to national laws. It is also not an EU institution. Supranational organisations such as the European Patent Office regulate their industrial relations in largely autonomous manner. The sole supervisory organ for the management is an Administrative Council in which 38 European countries are represented. They seem to be as much at odds with each other as the EU in relation to the refugee question, all the more so given that the Administrative Council includes non-EU states.

The threshold of pain has now been reached and the gulf between staff and management has never been so wide. Even slow learners must have finally realised that the Office is no longer capable of returning to normality under its own steam. European politicians now have another fire to fight and they need to intervene to extinguish it as a matter of urgency.

Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann

Economic Correspondent, Munich

Now that three translations are out there for readers to catch up with we are ready to return to normal coverage of new material. There is a lot more to come in the month of November. We truly hope that IP Kat‘s Merpel too will have the energy to keep up and continue at last week’s pace. As one commenter told Merpel: “This is already more than we have ever received from the EPO administration, apart from the propaganda and smears, of course…” █

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”

–Andre Gide

German Press Says Broken EPO Lets President Severely Punish Staff Not Even Guilty of Any Wrongdoing

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Juve

Summary: Juve publishes an article which attempts to be ‘balanced’ (meaning it believes everything that EPO officials say) but at the same time reveals unacceptable practices that go in inside the EPO

SEVERAL recent German press articles (with translations) have been supplied to us and we wish to share these for readers’ information and for future reference. The previous such translation spoke about threats against individual lawyers and herein we present an article from Juve. It helps highlight yet another example where EPO management evidently overrides any legal safeguards for staff. It is almost as though the EPO is neither a part of Europe nor even a part of Earth (the planet). Staff is being subjected to institutional harassment despite doing nothing wrong (that can be properly proven). Here is the original in German and the English translation as follows, with additional remarks below:

European Patent Office: Three members of the staff representation suspended

The problems at the European Patent Office (EPO) show no sign of abating. The Office has now initiated disciplinary proceedings against three staff representatives, as an EPO spokesperson confirmed to JUVE. Among them is Elizabeth Hardon, Chairperson of the Staff Union SUEPO and a member of the Munich staff representation. The actions of the Office triggered spontaneous protests.

Labour law attorney Şenay Okyay who is familiar with the latest developments expressed a clear criticism of the measures: Past experience of such disciplinary proceedings has shown that even if the disciplinary committee concludes that Hardon is not guilty of any wrongdoing, the President of the EPO does not consider himself to be bound by such findings. He could still decide on a dismissal or another disciplinary sanction. Only then could Hardon attempt to assert her rights before the Administrative Tribunal of the I.L.O. However, it usually takes many years before that Tribunal delivers its judgments and nobody is responsible for enforcing their execution.

“Past experience of such disciplinary proceedings has shown that even if the disciplinary committee concludes that Hardon is not guilty of any wrongdoing, the President of the EPO does not consider himself to be bound by such findings.”The attorney also criticized the fact that the suspensions are intended to muzzle the heads of the staff union SUEPO. This was contradicted by an EPA spokesman who claimed that the measures were justified by the misconduct of the staff representatives. The Office accuses the Union inter alia of data protection violations and harassment of colleagues. This is apparent from a statement by the EPO to its Member States which JUVE has seen. In addition, the Office disputes the claim that it initiated investigations into employees because they were SUEPO members. These measures were taken solely in order to investigate potential breaches of regulations by individual staff members. For this reason the EPO was not prepared to accede to SUEPO demands to terminate the disciplinary proceedings before the start of negotiations [about union recognition].

The disciplinary proceedings and suspensions triggered a spontaneous demonstration by staff in front of the EPO headquarters as well as protests on the Internet. The focus of the criticism is the manner in which the procedure has been conducted, because the disciplinary proceedings against Hardon were preceded by investigations carried out by the EPO’s so-called Investigation Unit. Such investigations are controversial because, according to the internal guidelines, the accused person does not have a right to remain silent and is not allowed to be accompanied by a lawyer during their interrogation. In the pending disciplinary proceedings, the defendants are now supposed to make written submissions in response to the allegations. This will be followed by a hearing before an internal committee equally composed of members of the management and staff representatives. According to experts, a decision may already be expected before Christmas.

“As has become known, the highest chamber of the internal judicial organ rejected as inadmissible a request to dismiss the judge.”In addition to the disciplinary proceedings at the EPO, a further lively discussion is taking place because proceedings to remove a member of the Boards of Appeal from office are also pending. Critics complain that this could jeopardize the independence of the internal judicial organ of the EPA. As has become known, the highest chamber of the internal judicial organ rejected as inadmissible a request to dismiss the judge. This request had been submitted by the Chairman of the Administrative Council, Jesper Kongstad. The Board of Appeal noted, inter alia, that in the case of a removal from office they needed to be certain that unsubstantiated or unfounded, false allegations could not be used as a pretext to get rid of an “irksome judge”.

However, in mid-October the Administrative Council initiated proceedings for the removal from office. Now the matter is before the Enlarged Board of Appeal for a second time.

Nevertheless, an EPO spokesperson announced that the social dialogue was to be continued in parallel to the three suspensions that include a “house ban”. The EPO is aiming to conclude an agreement with the staff unions and to grant them a legal standing in the EPO regulations which they have hitherto lacked. (Christina Schulze)

Recently, Juve interviewed and extensively quoted a prominent retired judge regarding the suspension of the above judge — a subject that we covered here before, even days ago when an English translation became publicly available. The article from Christina Schulze says that I.U. “investigations are controversial because, according to the internal guidelines, the accused person does not have a right to remain silent and is not allowed to be accompanied by a lawyer during their interrogation.”

“As a practising European Patent Attorney I am deeply concerned by the news emerging from the EPO and thank you for your good work in exposing the outrageous conditions.”
      –Anonymous European Patent AttorneyBut actually, even worse things are happening, as we covered in our recent series [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Then there is the rogue bunch of activities introduced by CRG, as covered in the articles below. Schulze speaks of “protests on the Internet.” Maybe she should speak to some people who write about this subject online ahead of publication of her next article. She can also speak to some angry patent lawyers, under the privilege/promise of anonymity. It is evident that even ‘clients’ (applicants) of the EPO are visibly upset. One person wrote this just before the weekend: “As a former patent attorney who once had a lot of respect for the EPO, this is pretty appalling.”

Remember that there is nowhere else for lawyers to turn to. The EPO has a monopoly in Europe, so poor service from the EPO harms everybody. It’s as if the EPO is “too big to fail”.

Earlier today a European lawyer told us: “As a practising European Patent Attorney I am deeply concerned by the news emerging from the EPO and thank you for your good work in exposing the outrageous conditions.”

There is a lot more to this story than the EPO's PR 'firewall' cares to admit. If journalists like Schulze require more information on the subject, we will be happy to assist; we feel obliged to help.

This clearly isn’t a case of angry peasants with pitchforks going after rich ‘successful’ guys but a case of abusive under-qualified old buddies from France regrouping and ganging up against doctors and professors who decided to become patent examiners. █

German Media Reveals That Out-of-Control EPO Management is Even Threatening and Abusing Lawyers Now

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“A month after the scandal broke, I tried to go back to work at the pharmaceutical company after a leave of absence. But because of all the publicity and resulting pressure and stress, I finally resigned.”

–Donna Rice

Summary: The EPO’s longstanding fight against justice escalates to an unprecedented war on lawyers themselves; “After this latest move,” says a German newspaper, “even lawyers are starting to feel threatened by the Office.”

THE EPO scandals became a mainstream subject again, partly owing to protests and in part due to their root cause, namely the crushing of unions at the very heart of Europe, or the supposedly ‘civilised’ world with famous courts dedicated to human rights (Geneva, Strasbourg, The Hague and so on). I got my cup of coffee ready and tonight I am planning to release as many translation as I am able to, for tomorrow we have many important articles to publish, despite it being a Sunday before US Thanksgiving and shopping holiday (Black Friday). We did, after all, promise to accelerate our coverage of EPO matters in retaliation for the EPO’s shameful attack on staff representatives. There is a very busy week ahead.

The EPO’s management is very stressed at the moment. We have been told so by numerous sources. Symptoms of the nothing-to-lose behaviour are clearly showing right now; that’s pretty much expected. See how Richard Nixon responded to the Watergate scandal as it unfolded. We now have an office (EPO) which ignores any rational analysis of the outcome (or backlash) of following a certain line of action, reacting out of urge because otherwise it might be a lot worse, at least in the short term. We saw that with illegal surveillance, abuse of critics (e.g. trademark-trolling), and so much more. The EPO keeps dancing from one scandal to the next, failing to acknowledge the core issues and actually tackle them, as opposed to the messengers. This waltz cannot last forever and sooner or later it can all implode (or explode) so badly that some people will end up in prison. Remember the Watergate scandal. There are many parables here.

“The EPO keeps dancing from one scandal to the next, failing to acknowledge the core issues and actually tackle them, as opposed to the messengers.”The EPO is intimidating and professionally harming not only internal messengers. Team Battistelli is not only going after staff these days but also journalists. “Don’t know about journalists,” Florian Müller told me some hours ago, “but Münchner Merkur reported the EPO tried to get a union lawyer disbarred.” Here is Münchner Merkur‘s article and its translation into English below. To quote this one comment about the article: “It reveals that even external attorneys who dare to represent the union are subjected to threats and legal procedures by the office administration. When will this terror be stopped?”

If this was a private company that had to make “sales” (or provide services over which it competes with a rival), it would definitely have been boycotted by now and people who were responsible for such reprehensible acts would have long ago been sacked. The EPO is magically different, however, as it is effectively a monopoly inside Europe and without a board of directors, shareholders etc. there is virtually no oversight or supervision which is potent and effective. Immunity, moreover, places Team Battistelli above the law! The only oversight or supervision can be the European public, which is the equivalent of shareholders because of the flow of tax in circulation.

To quote this one new comment about the AC's callous actions (AC is the Administrative Council): “What is extremely worrying is that this bunch of people, the AC and the president are presiding over the fate of a major institution in the world of IP. It is frightening to see the level of self satisfaction this people exude…. In a private company they would have been fired yesterday rather than today.”

Here is the full article translated into English:

ECONOMY
 
 

EPO building
The EPO in Munich is an international organisation with 7000 employees which is not subject to the law of any individual state, and consequently German law does not apply here. © Klaus Haag

Updated: 18.11.15 – 18:33

Public Authorities

Europe’s Patent Office kicks out union officials

Munich – The European Patent Office has suspended three senior officials of the staff union. Three further colleagues are threatened with a similar fate. They are also subject to internal investigations which are supposed to remain confidential.

“Many staff members, however, react with an air of resignation. They have been protesting in vain against Battistelli’s methods for years.”The working atmosphere at the European Patent Office (EPO) has been severely disturbed for quite some time. The ongoing dispute between management and staff representatives has now escalated to a new peak of intensity. Following the Office’s recent unprecedented suspension of a patent judge, three senior staff union officials have now been subjected to the same fate. Those relieved of their duties are the chairperson of the EPO’s own staff union, her predecessor and the treasurer, as confirmed by an EPO spokeperson. The trio is now facing the threat of dismissal.

The allegations vary. In one case, they relate to the disclosure of confidential information and harassment, in another to unlawful provision of legal aid to EPA staff. According to the official statute, the persons concerned are not permitted to make any public statement. Their lawyers reject all of the allegations.

“Battistelli continues to do as he pleases without restraint.”Many of the 7000-strong staff reacted by participating in a spontaneous demonstration in front of the glass facade of the EPO’s Munich headquarters. Their anger is directed towards their supreme boss and chief executive of the EPO, Benoit Battistelli. “This is a blow against all of us, a declaration of war on the workforce,” stated an excited demonstrator. “Battistelli is targeting our figureheads” said a colleague referring to the staff union committee which appears to be almost completely under threat. Many staff members, however, react with an air of resignation. They have been protesting in vain against Battistelli’s methods for years. Appeals to politicians have fizzled out without any visible effect. Battistelli continues to do as he pleases without restraint. “If our Administrative Council fails to intervene in its role as the final supervisory instance, then everything will go down the drain,” is the fear voiced by one staff member. Discussions about wildcat strikes are already doing the rounds. But fears about their job can also be seen in some faces. Following the three suspensions, the Office has threatened three more SUEPO members with disciplinary procedures. Among them is the chairperson of SUEPO in Vienna and, according to staff sources, two staff union officials
in the Hague which is the fourth location of the EPO alongside the headquarters in Munich and the branch offices in Berlin and Vienna.

Lawyers are particularly critical about the manner in which actions have been taken against two staff union officials who are being indicted for their trade union activities. The Office has placed them under investigation because it objects to the manner in which SUEPO provides legal aid to staff involved in employment disputes. This is an attempt to suppress union activities, was the criticism which came from one SUEPO lawyer.

“Discussions about wildcat strikes are already doing the rounds.”Should the international organisation, which is not a EU institution, prevail with the hard line which it is following this would seem to run counter to the instructions of the EPO’s Administrative Council. The Council recently placed the Office under an obligation to officially recognize SUEPO as representatives of the staff. Now the union’s top officials are collectively under attack. “Your behavior is against the law,” writes one SUEPO lawyer in a letter of reply to the EPO Personnel Director, Elodie Bergot. Another lawyer argues that the Office cannot claim confidentiality when union leaders are being subjected to investigation and threatened with disciplinary action. On the contrary, such attempts to administer justice in secret should be made public.

“After this latest move even lawyers are starting to feel threatened by the Office.”Union officials are accused of leaking confidential information because they reported internally about the investigations against them. A third lawyer expresses his views in clear terms: “The Office is trying to eliminate all SUEPO leaders and gag them,” he says. What is happening now is a blatant assault on a trade union which would result in a public outcry if it took place in this form inside a normal company in Germany. The EPO has even lodged a complaint with the Lawyer’s Association in an attempt to initiate proceedings for professional misconduct against a legal colleague who also represents SUEPO. After this latest move even lawyers are starting to feel threatened by the Office.

Thomas Magenheim-Hörmann

We still have many translations to go through and we warmly welcome more translations if anyone masters French, Dutch and/or German. Accuracy is important here because without accuracy nitpicking becomes possible (see the responses to Vice-President Lutz, VP5, in IP Kat‘s English translation, supposedly provided by the EPO itself).

One article that we really want a translation of is this new one in Dutch (it’s hardest for us to find people who are fluent in Dutch because it’s a relatively small population). █

Washington Post Only Entertains Debate About Patent Trolls (But Not Patent Scope) Whilst US Lawyers Trick the System to Patent Software

Posted in America, Law, Patents at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Because Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, likes software patents

Washington Post-Amazon

Summary: The Bezos-owned Washington Post continues to help those who wish to eliminate patent trolls (which bother Amazon amongst other large conglomerates) but remains void of any coverage about patent scope, including software patents that patent lawyers work so hard to defend

Days after the Washington Post, a generally well-regarded journal of record (with government connections and ownership by the CIA’s ‘Webmaster’), had published Bessen's and Meurer's piece (potentially targeting US politicians) it also published an article by Julie Samuels, whose general thesis is similar to that of Bessen. The headline was composed of two sentences and said: “Patents are supposed to encourage innovation. Without reform, they’ll do the opposite.”

“Patents are supposed to encourage innovation. Without reform, they’ll do the opposite.”
      –Julie Samuels“Patent reform,” explained Samuels, “isn’t the kind of topic you’d expect to get much attention. It’s really boring — and I mean deep in the weeds wonky and boring. But start-ups and small inventors are now so threatened by people exploiting loopholes in the patent system that Congress must now step in and take action.

“That’s why patent reform moved from the back halls of Congress to front and center of policy debates. It’s all thanks to the emergence of the “patent troll” — an entity that doesn’t produce things based on its patents but instead uses patents to sue (or threaten to sue) others for infringing them.”

As we noted the other day, the media and the politicians in the US hardly even mention patent reform anymore. Since returning from holidays/recess the subject has been largely buried. Patent lawyers in particular aren’t quite so interested in such change, which might only harm their parasitic business.

“Don’t think for a second that the corporate media is now favourable towards reformists.”Techrights has been generally supportive of Bessen, Meurer, and Samuels. They are well-meaning people and they aren’t necessarily going to gain (financially or otherwise) from the reform. They just want a functional patent system that rewards and encourages real innovation. A lot of patent systems, including today’s EPO and USPTO, view themselves as money-making machines. They don’t seem to care at all what their grants are causing both financially and technologically (embezzling the poor and retarding innovation). There are also ethical considerations, such as killing of the poor (because drugs are priced way out of reach, owing to patent monopolies and artificial price inflation by monopolists).

Don’t think for a second that the corporate media is now favourable towards reformists. As we have said here for years, patent lawyers are winning this battle by virtually flooding the media with their talking points, pressuring politicians with their lobbyists and so on. The owner of the Washington Post is himself a big part of this problem, so don’t expect the corporate media to speak for the people. It speaks for large corporations and the people who own these corporations. Some corporations want to stop trolls, and trolls only (usually the small ones, not themselves). They’re not interested in debates about patent scope, for instance (the owner of the Washington Post brings software patents even to Europe).

Speaking of software patents, Seyfarth Shaw LLP (i.e. patent lawyers) only ever covers Alice v. CLS Bank by cherry-picking cases where the case leaves software patents in tact. Here is the latest example of this pattern (article by Patrick T. Muffo).

“They are trying to work around the rules and maybe bamboozle/trick patent examiners, if not just offend their intelligence in order to get their way.”Jacek Wnuk from Lewis Roca Rothgerber (lawyers again) is again giving tips [1, 2] like “Strategies to Increase Probability of Obtaining a Software Patent”. They are trying to work around the rules and maybe bamboozle/trick patent examiners, if not just offend their intelligence in order to get their way. Joe Bird from Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP does the same thing and he has just reposted in another lawyers’ site some of his ‘tricks’.

To quote some examples of ‘tricks’: “First, any invention or patent claim that sounds like it might be interpreted as falling under one of the four categories of abstract ideas identified above should be approached by a patent practitioner with careful eye toward addition of inventive concepts to the claims.”

“…a patent practitioner can effectively boost his/her odds of obtaining and keeping an issued patent at the drafting, prosecution, and litigation stages.”
      –Patent lawyerSo what they are saying is that it’s merely the art of misleading with words, not actually changing what you wish to be covered by a patent. In conclusion it says: “Successfully patenting processes and systems with software elements can often be difficult due to the continuing vagueness surrounding the “abstract idea” patentability exception and the newer “something more” inquiry, but can be very rewarding if the patent ultimately issues, paving the way for paid licensing agreements, cross-licensing agreements, and infringement protection. By keeping a close eye on cases decided by the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit, and on examples and guidance provided by the USPTO, a patent practitioner can effectively boost his/her odds of obtaining and keeping an issued patent at the drafting, prosecution, and litigation stages.”

When will media like the Washington Post begin a serious debate about patent scope? When will it stop pushing the agenda of large tax-dodging corporations that not only patent software in the US but also in Europe? When will people realise that the corporate media isn’t actually interested in a real patent reform but just like Les Échos would rather protect those in power? █

“Amazon Chief’s Deal [to buy Washington Post for $250 million] Doesn’t Involve Online Retailer but Shows Media Power Shift [to incredibly rich people]“

–Wall Street Journal, owned by another billionaire, Rupert Murdoch

It Pays (Off) to ‘Bribe’ the Media: Watch How Les Échos Covers EPO Matters and Self-Censors

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

On newspapers for sale, not to the public but to the richest 1%

Les Échos and EPO

Summary: French newspaper Les Échos is self-censoring yet again and it is framing the EPO scandals as the fault of employees, not the fault of abusive managers who are working with Les Échos as a so-called ‘media partner’ (the EPO management is French-dominated)

We’ve finally finished colour-coding the EPO Wiki. Some of the items which we covered earlier this year showed how the EPO’s management had paid journals, newspapers and so on for puff pieces and positive coverage (basically bought coverage). Is this what science and technology stand for? Isn’t that a gross abuse of EPO funds? Remember how newspapers went as far as censoring their own reporters after the EPO’s managers had apparently paid. We’ll never forget this.

“Some of the items which we covered earlier this year showed how the EPO’s management had paid journals, newspapers and so on for puff pieces and positive coverage (basically bought coverage).”A reader has drawn our attention to this French article (translation would be appreciated). “I saw this bit in one of the comments,” he explained, “which you don’t seem to have picked up.”

Since we don’t have people who comprehend French here, it hasn’t helped. “Truly jaw-dropping,” called it our reader, “and we’ve seen a lot in this story already. “Les Échos” is a French business newspaper, who already swiftly canned coverage mildly unfavorable to Benoît Battistelli.”

We covered it earlier this year. Les Échos is basically disgracing itself and demonstrates that it self-censors based on who’s paying. The EPO is disgracing itself by paying journalists.

“Here are the first few lines of what on the surface seems to be a piece of, er, commissioned work,” wrote our reader, “followed by my quick translation…”

Here is what was sent to us:

Accueil > Dossiers thema > Transformation : mettre de l’agilité dans son organisation

Transformation : les « ennemis » de l’intérieur

Collaborateurs, syndicats et même patrons sont parfois si réfractaires au changement que le processus de transformation de l’entreprise s’en trouve contrarié. Les exemples de l’Office européen des brevets (OEB), Air France KLM et de PSA.

Looking at the page right now, we notice that it says this:

Collaborateurs, syndicats et même patrons sont parfois si réfractaires au changement que le processus de transformation de l’entreprise s’en trouve contrarié. Les exemples de l’Office européen des brevets (OEB), Air France et KLM.

Got the difference? Focus on the part that says “et de PSA.” Got removed? Was it self-censorship? Editorial decision? Pressure from the entities covered? Les Échos is increasingly looking like a farce.

Here is the translation we have been given:

Home -> Themes -> Transformation -> put agility in your organisation

Transformation: The enemies within

“Employees, unions and even bosses are sometimes so averse to change that the business transformation process is hindered. Some examples from the EPO, Air France KLM, and PSA.”

The part about PSA was altogether removed. In fact, PSA (PSA Peugeot-Citroen) is no longer even mentioned in this article at all! What a splendid act of deletionism, regarding a French entity (like much of the EPO’s management).

“The rest is a sickening puff piece,” told us the reader, “essentially LITERALLY revolving on how poor old Conducator Benoît Battistelli is hindered in his Promethean achievements by a mean backward union hostile to progress.”

As one person put it in IP Kat comments:

Maybe the appropriate moment to remind the readers that the French newspaper Les Echos is a “media partner” of the EPO (see the bottom of this page for example: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2eNzC-MVKc0J:https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor_fr.html , or already reported on this very blog: http://ipkitten.blogspot.de/2015/06/french-toast-leaves-sour-taste-for.html ). Les Echos is bound by contract with the EPO and whilst Mr. Benoît Battistelli is so boastful on transparency, the contracts with the EPO “media partners”, alike his own employement contract, are well kept secrets. Careful observers can only speculate that actual journalism is not part of it since when it happens by accident, it is promptly corrected: http://techrights.org/2015/06/18/les-echos-epo-censorship/ and http://ipkitten.blogspot.de/2015/06/french-toast-leaves-sour-taste-for.html ).

Anyone having followed the events can only come to the conclusion that the latest report of Les Echos does not depart from this secret contract since the misrepresentation of facts is systematic and the comparison of the EPO with other patent offices, not as local administrative authorities but as competing private entities, is stunning!

There are other good comments there, one about the timing of this article (exactly a day after massive staff protests, immediately to be followed by projection and blame-shifting):

I was at the demo and this article seems to have forgotten an important fight: the timing.

In their last meeting, the council instructed the president to renew social dialogue and start a social study. On the very day the board 28 meets, the president suspends 3 elected personal representatives. It cannot be by chance that it happens the very same day. Next, to make sure the council really loses face, he will probably fire all three on the day the council meets in december.

In the demo, Els Hardon said it looked like a declaration of war from the president to the council. Apparently, it is also not the first time that the president tells members of the council (who are supposed to be his superiors) that they are idiots and that he knows better.

The president is out of control. He is not following the orders from the council, that is a blatant fact. In the demo, it was asked whether he is actually becoming insane (not by Els hardon, I don’t remember by whom, more people spoke).

Now I have a question: what happens if the president of the office is incapacited (for example, because he is becoming insane)? Is there a provision in that case, something like an interim? I would like an article about that.

In the future we will cover more such stories because it is evident that EPO meddling/intervening inside the media (like paying Les Échos or some respected journals) has an effect. Les Échos is once again defending the EPO’s management, perhaps hoping for money to come from it in the future. Corporate media is not designed to inform; it’s designed to maximise profit. █

‘Leaked’ PDF Shows How EPO Management Tried to Crush Judge Who ‘Dared’ to Criticise EPO Management

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

PDF leak

Summary: The EPO’s management continues to chill potential critics and is now making an example of a board’s judge, despite having no such authority over him

THE EPO is so abusive and its management so secretive that documents which ought to have been made publicly-accessible need to be ‘leaked’. The following document [PDF] has been unleashed online and we’ve made a copy of it for future reference. The title of the document is “Datasheet for the decision of 17 September 2015″. In it, one can see how the EPO’s management tried to violate rules and ultimately bury the whole matter, leaving everyone in the boards perpetually terrified of the ‘insane dictator’ (typical intimidation tactic, where the dictator demonstrates blatant disregards for rules and safeguards, such as International Law).

“Is this what a person gets for speaking out against abuses inside the EPO?”Merpel has linked to this PDF (uploaded to Google/PRISM). “Merpel’s link does not point to the actual document as issued by the Enlarged Board,” she explained, “but rather to a slightly transmoggified version. If you spot a formatting or typographical oddity, it’s down to Merpel. Don’t ask why, simply accept that kats are largely incomprehensible creatures. However, Merpel did not redact details of the allegations and evidence (or lack thereof) — that was the Enlarged Board’s own doing for obvious reasons.

“For some reason the EPO has not seen fit to publish this Enlarged Board decision on its website in the usual speedy fashion we have come to expect. Perhaps the top management is enjoying it too much to share with the world. Merpel, who has read it with equal interest, isn’t so selfish. She looks forward to your comments.”

Read the comments below, including the comment that says: “It seems that the respondent was permitted to access the building for this one time! Was he frisked by the President’s goons? [...] According to some sources, the president docked the respondent salary by 50%. Would BB dare to dock it further in order to offset the reimbursement ordered by the EBoA? And could the EBoA order the President to restore the respondent’s salary and pay the monies withheld?”

“According to some sources, the president docked the respondent [judge's] salary by 50%.”
      –AnonymousWe have heard the same thing about the salary and we also learned that the judge’s career was mostly “in the sewer” right now, due to this aggressive (and probably illegal) behaviour from the EPO’s management. Is this what a person gets for speaking out against abuses inside the EPO?

As a side note, we wish to advise readers not to rely on Google for anonymity/privacy because under a court’s pressure Google has a history of divulging identities (unmasking people). Also, if one links to Google’s Blogspot, one must be aware that Google continues to publicly reveal the location of the linker by TLD. This can be manually corrected (obfuscated). █

Links 21/11/2015: Community Appreciation Day, Jolla’s Problems

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 20/11/2015:

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Being Thankful for Open Source (But Why Do Companies Do It?)

    It’s Thanksgiving time, and I’m surely thankful for the free open source software I use. But going open source always seemed counter-intuitive to me. Why would a company invest time, money and development resources to create valuable intellectual property and then throw it out to everyone to use for free as they see fit?

  • Improving accessibility for 8 open source projects

    I’ve been involved in open source ever since I made the switch to Linux four years ago, sometimes as a code contributor, sometimes just filing bugs and improving documentation. And, as some of you may already know, I’m visually impaired.

    As such, most of the open source projects I’m involved in revolve around accessibility. These are the 8 open source projects I use and work on as part of the open source accessibility community.

  • Is Open Source Making Strides to Become More Diverse?

    The lack of women in the computer science field is not a new development. In fact, only 30 percent of the 707 students studying computer science at Stanford University are female. But the tide may be turning as women are beginning to make their presence known in the open source world.

  • Google Open Sources Tools for Importing Mail into Gmail

    Remember when Gmail was new? It was back in 2004 that Google offered a beta of its now very widely used email platform. Still, lots of people get their email on other platforms, and with that in mind, Google has open sourced two projects that make it very easy to import mail into Gmail.

    “We have two new open-source projects to help people import their existing email into Gmail using the Gmail API,” notes a Google post: mail-importer and import-mailbox-to-gmail.

  • Nmap 7 Released

    The Nmap Project is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 7.00 from https://nmap.org/. It is the product of three and a half years of work, nearly 3200 code commits, and more than a dozen point releases since the big Nmap 6 release in May 2012. Nmap turned 18 years old in September this year and celebrates its birthday with 171 new NSE scripts, expanded IPv6 support, world-class SSL/TLS analysis, and more user-requested features than ever. We recommend that all current users upgrade.

  • CAM Editor v3.2.2 for XML, JSON, SQL and UML with UI forms now available

    CAM combines all this elegantly in one template along with the content and business rules. Allowing designers and developers to work coherently together. This can shave weeks of manual effort off the typical development life cycle and guarantee consistent results.

  • Events

    • FOSDEM ’16 — Call for Participation

      FOSDEM 2016 (the free and open source developer’s meeting in Brussels, Europe) will feature a new track on Containers and Process isolation. Therefore, we invite developers and users from the containers community to join us for this track and present your talks or demos.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Extensions – AKA Total Absence of Privacy

        Google, claiming that Chrome is the safest web browser out there, is actually making it very simple for extensions to hide how aggressively they are tracking their users. We have also discovered exactly how intrusive this sort of tracking actually is and how these tracking companies actually do a lot of things trying to hide it. Due to the fact that the gathering of data is made inside an extension, all other extensions created to prevent tracking (such as Ghostery) are completely bypassed.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Better polygon rendering in LibreOffice’s Gtk3 Support

      Above is how LibreOffice’s “svp” backend rendered rotated text outlines in chart where the text is represented by polygon paths. Because the gtk3 backend is based on that svp backend that’s what you got with the gtk3 support enabled.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • It’s NotABug …

      As Gitorious recently faded away, we have been searching for a Git Hosting solution for our FSFE Localgroup Zurich. We have evaluated several options including self-hosting. The latter has been tested with a software called GitBucket but it seems that a lot of recourses are required for that. At least it does not work well on my Atom-based Server.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • The force is with us!(So Close!)

        Here we have a lot of long runs *(prints with more than 4 hours) hope that you enjoy it ! The material used is ABS provided by our sponsor, “Filamentos 3D Brasil“, thanks a lot fot the stuff and support guys!

  • Programming

    • Camel in a Hat: perl-CryptX package

      I’m going to package CryptX Perl module [1] soon.

    • rough code and working consensus

      On their better days, standards groups follow a principle of rough consensus and working code. Somebody builds something, announces it to some friends and maybe a few competitors, and says, hey, if you build something similar, it’s possible for our implementations to interoperate. Everyone’s a winner. Sometimes the design isn’t perfect, but the fact that at least one person/group has built an implementation is an existence proof that it can be built. Valuable knowledge to have.

Leftovers

  • No UI is the New UI
  • No UI is some UI

    He’s talking here about “invisible apps”: Magic and Operator and to some extent Google Now and Siri; apps that aren’t on a screen. Voice or messaging or text control. And he’s wholly right. Point and click has benefits — it’s a lot easier to find a thing you want to do, if you don’t know what it’s called — but it throws away all the nuance and skill of language and reduces us to cavemen jabbing a finger at a fire and grunting. We’ve spent thousands of years refining words as a way to do things; they are good at communicating intent1. On balance, they’re better than pictures, although obviously some sort of harmony of the two is better still. Ikea do a reasonable job of providing build instructions for Billy bookcases without using any words at all, but I don’t think I’d like to see their drawings of what “honour” is, or how to run a conference.

  • Science

    • Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

      The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

      NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era’

      The world is on the cusp of a “post-antibiotic era”, scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed.

      They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort – colistin – in patients and livestock in China.

      They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.

      It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals.

    • Gene that makes bacteria immune to last-resort antibiotic can spread

      A newly identified gene that renders bacteria resistant to polymyxin antibiotics—drugs often used as the last line of defense against infections—has the potential to be shared between different types of bacteria. The finding raises concern that the transferable gene could make its way into infectious bacteria that are already highly resistant to drugs, thereby creating strains of bacteria immune to every drug in doctors’ arsenal.

    • UK running public consultation on NHS England mandate 2016-2020

      Every year, the Secretary of State must publish a mandate to ensure that NHS England’s objectives remain up to date. The mandate sets the objectives of NHS England as well as its budget. The latter will be determined after the Spending Review will be concluded on 25 November.

      This year, every government department is producing a plan setting out its objectives to 2020 and how achieve them. The mandate to NHS England is part of the Department of Health’s plan and will take effect from April 2016.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • I was held hostage by Isis. They fear our unity more than our airstrikes

      As a proud Frenchman I am as distressed as anyone about the events in Paris. But I am not shocked or incredulous. I know Islamic State. I spent 10 months as an Isis hostage, and I know for sure that our pain, our grief, our hopes, our lives do not touch them. Theirs is a world apart.

      Most people only know them from their propaganda material, but I have seen behind that. In my time as their captive, I met perhaps a dozen of them, including Mohammed Emwazi: Jihadi John was one of my jailers. He nicknamed me “Baldy”.

      Even now I sometimes chat with them on social media, and can tell you that much of what you think of them results from their brand of marketing and public relations. They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity.

    • The left has an Islam problem: If liberals won’t come to terms with religious extremism, the xenophobic right will carry the day

      There’s a persistent taboo on the Left which demands that every incident of terror be attributed to American foreign policy. Terrorism is a hydra-headed problem, and it’s not reducible to a single cause – religion and politics and economics and foreign policy and institutional corruption are critical variables. Does America’s history of looting and corruption in the Middle East matter? Absolutely. Is the world and the region currently paying the price for the West’s self-interested partitioning of the Middle East after World War I? Without question. But Islamists aren’t killing cartoonists because the U.S. invaded Iraq. And ISIS isn’t exterminating the Yazidis because of America’s sordid relationship with Saudi Arabia.

      [...]

      Their hatred of infidels and their belief in martyrdom and armed Jihad have a scriptural basis, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. And their brand of Islam isn’t radically different from the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia. Most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists and don’t share this vision of life, just as most Christians aren’t stoning adulterers, even though there are biblical injunctions to do so. But it’s disingenuous to say ISIS has no connection to Islamic tradition.

    • The Peaceful Muslim Majority Is “Irrelevant,” Says Brigitte Gabriel [see comment]

      After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in some ways is on-going in:

      Bangladesh — Muslim 83%
      Egypt — Muslim 90%
      Gaza — Muslim 98.7%
      Indonesia — Muslim 86.1%
      Iran — Muslim 98%
      Iraq — Muslim 97%
      Jordan — Muslim 92%
      Morocco — Muslim 98.7%
      Pakistan — Muslim 97%
      Palestine — Muslim 99%
      Syria — Muslim 90%
      Tajikistan — Muslim 90%
      Turkey — Muslim 99.8%
      United Arab Emirates — Muslim 96%

      100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ — the Islamic House of Peace. Here there’s supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:

      Afghanistan — Muslim 100%
      Saudi Arabia — Muslim 100%
      Somalia — Muslim 100%
      Yemen — Muslim 100%

    • Turkey soccer fans boo moment of silence for Paris attacks

      Before today’s Greece vs. Turkey friendly match in Istanbul both teams shared a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Paris attacks.

    • Turkey could cut off Islamic State’s supply lines. So why doesn’t it?

      In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless stream of atrocities inside the Middle East.

    • Mass graves of women ‘too old to be Isil sex slaves’ – this is what we’re up against

      In the desert dust of Sinjar, in north west Iraq, a walking stick lies on the ground.

      Strewn casually alongside it are a couple of pairs of scissors, some household keys and a shoe. Bank notes flutter in the dirt.

      But, if you look a little closer, the scene becomes a horror show. Clumps of hair and fragments of bone poke grotesquely out of the ditch. It is estimated that almost 80 women are buried in this mass grave, aged between 40 and 80-years-old. The bodies are of Yazidi women, murdered by Islamic State butchers.

    • CIA Chief: Terrorists Harder to Find, Because of Leaks, Reforms

      On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US’ Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked…

    • Jewish teacher stabbed in Marseilles by purported ISIS supporters

      A teacher at a Jewish school in the southern French city of Marseilles was stabbed on Wednesday by three people professing support for Islamic State, but his life was not in danger, prosecutors said.

      The victim was identified as Tziyon Saadon who is in his fifties.

      The three men who attacked the teacher uttered anti-Semitic remarks during the incident, AFP reported.

    • Saudi Wahhabi dilemma in spotlight after Paris attack

      Saudi Arabia’s harsh religious tradition is seen by many outsiders – and some Saudi liberals – as a root cause of the international jihadist threat that has inflamed the Middle East for years and struck in Paris last week.

      However, while Riyadh has cracked down hard on jihadists at home, jailing thousands, stopping hundreds from traveling to fight abroad and cutting militant finance streams, its approach to religion has raised a dilemma.

    • Islam Is a Religion of Violence

      Can the wave of violence sweeping the Islamic world be traced back to the religion’s core teachings? An FP debate about the roots of extremism.

    • Sadiq Khan: Muslims are growing up in this country without ever ‘knowing anyone from a different background’

      Muslims are growing up in this country without ever “knowing anyone from a different background”, one of Britain’ most senior Muslim politicians has warned.

      Sadiq Khan, Labour’s London Mayoral contender, said the wake of the Paris attacks British Muslims had a “special role” to play in tackling extremism.

      Mr Khan said: “Too many British Muslims grow up without really knowing anyone from a different background. Without understanding or empathising with the lives and beliefs of others.”

    • Saudi court sentences poet to death for renouncing Islam

      A Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent contemporary art scene has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam.

      A Saudi court on Tuesday ordered the execution of Ashraf Fayadh, who has curated art shows in Jeddah and at the Venice Biennale. The poet, who said he did not have legal representation, was given 30 days to appeal against the ruling.

      Fayadh, 35, a key member of the British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes by the general court in Abha, a city in the south-west of the ultraconservative kingdom, in May 2014.

    • Syria secretly sentenced free software developer Bassel Khartabil to death

      Khartabil has been imprisoned in a Syria’s Adra Prison since 2012, though as of October, he has been transferred to an undisclosed location. The free software/open culture activist was the lead for Creative Commons Syria and has contributed to Wikipedia, Firefox and many other projects.

      He was arrested on the first anniversary of the Syrian uprising, and was tortured for five days by Syria’s Military Branch 215 and was tried, without access to counsel, on charges of “harming state security.” His arrest and detention have been widely decried; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for his immediate release.

      Noura Ghazi, Khartabil’s wife, a human rights lawyer, reports that he has been secretly sentenced to death by a military tribunal.

    • At least 27 dead as gunmen seize more than 100 at Mali hotel

      Suspected Islamist gunmen stormed a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital Friday, firing automatic weapons and seizing more than 100 guests and staff in a hostage-taking that left at least 27 people dead.

      Special forces staged a dramatic floor-by-floor rescue at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, according to local television and security sources, to end the nine-hour siege.

      The assault, which France has said was likely masterminded by notorious Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, added to fears over the global jihadist threat a week after the Paris massacre that left 130 people dead.

      Malian television broadcast chaotic scenes from inside the hotel as police and other security personnel ushered bewildered guests along corridors and across the main lobby.

    • UN Confirms 29 People Killed in Mali Siege, Including 2 Attackers
    • Mali Hotel Attack Leaves at Least 21 Dead, Including an American

      Assailants with guns blazing on Friday attacked a hotel hosting diplomats and others in Mali’s capital, leaving at least 21 people dead and trapping dozens in the building for hours, officials in the West African Nation said.

      Malian and U.N. security forces launched a counterattack at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako and escorted guests out. By late afternoon, no hostages were believed to remain in the building, army Col. Mamadou Coulibaly told reporters.

    • NJ native Anita Datar killed in hostage attack in Mali

      A woman with ties to New Jersey is among the victims killed in an attack on a hotel in Mali. At least 20 people were killed when terrorists took hostages at a Radison hotel in Bamako Friday.

      The State Department has not released the name, but family has identified her as Anita Datar.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • World Trade Organization Puts Dolphins At Risk

      Today, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled against the dolphin-saving U.S. labeling program for tuna, calling it a “technical barrier to trade.” Mexico brought the case against the U.S.

      Since 1990, the United States has maintained a “dolphin-safe” labeling program for tuna that allows consumers to choose to purchase tuna caught in a manner that does not kill dolphins. The “dolphin-safe” label has contributed to a 97-percent reduction in dolphin deaths since the 1980s in Pacific waters where dolphins and tuna cohabitate.

    • Palm Farmers’ Group: Indonesia’s Action on Haze Won’t Stop Burning

      Forest fires in Indonesia that have caused choking smoke across much of Southeast Asia will flare up again next year because government action to tackle the crisis is ineffective, a palm farmers group said.

      Indonesia and the wider Southeast Asian region have been suffering for weeks from smoke caused by smoldering forest and peatland fires, largely in Sumatra and Borneo islands that authorities have struggled to contain.

    • Indonesia Is Burning, And The World Hasn’t Noticed

      Indonesia is burning. More than 3,000 miles of burning forest and peat have already emitted more carbon dioxide in the past few months than the annual emissions of Germany. It’s the worst set of fires the country has seen since 1997, a year in which 15,000 children under the age of three died from air pollution. More than 500,000 respiratory tract infections have been reported since July 1, and Indonesia’s 43 million people have been inhaling toxic fumes for months. Some children have already died from complications, while others have been evacuated out of the country on emergency warships. Blame the Indonesia fire’s slow burn, or global short attention spans for a lack of coverage, but this story has been building for months without much of an audience — and it’s not just an Indonesian problem.

      [...]

      As for all the smoke, it’s not coming from Indonesia’s living plants, but the layers of peat underneath them. This makes the problem that much worse: the peat smolders and keeps fires burning for months while releasing 10 times more methane (which is 21 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) than a normal fire. In the worst hit areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Pollutant Standard Index has put pollution levels around 2,000 (anything above 300 is considered hazardous). The toxic haze is also affecting other countries as it drifts over Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.

    • Indonesia’s “Land Mafia” Sets Forests Ablaze

      The seriousness of the Indonesian forest fires can no longer be ignored.

      As 40 million people gasp for breath and tens of thousands of hectares of forest are on fire in Indonesia, the world continues to revolve like nothing dangerous happens. When more than 500,000 people suffer from acute respiratory infection and wildlife habitat are exposed to damage, people across the globe have barely responded.

      For the past two months, the sky of the Borneo and Sumatra islands has been blurred in smoke, just as hazy as the huge capitalism game behind this structured, man-made eco-disaster.

      What makes matters worse is that mass media appear to be gradually slipping away even though, as George Monbiot said, it’s almost definitely the 21st century’s greatest environmental disaster to date.

    • Indonesia bans peatlands destruction after fires hospitalised 500,000

      The president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, has ordered the restoration of burned peatlands and banned their clearance after disastrous fires caused severe pollution and hospitalised roughly 500,000 people in recent weeks.

      The ruling is in response to recent fires that polluted skies across Southeast Asia, and released about 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon.

      Widodo has banned the clearance and conversion of carbon-dense peatlands across Indonesia through a series of presidential and ministerial instructions issued over the last two-and-a-half weeks.

    • Will the “Tobacco Strategy” Work Against Big Oil?

      According to InsideClimate News, the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had been investigating ExxonMobil for a year before it issued a recent subpoena for “documents on what Exxon knew about climate change and what it told shareholders and the public.” The subpoena compelled ExxonMobil to hand over scientific research and communications about climate change dating back to 1977. (Exxon and Mobil merged to become a single corporation in 1999.) The investigation is based on New York State’s consumer-protection and general-business laws and, crucially, the state’s Martin Act, InsideClimate News reported. That statute prohibits fraud or misrepresentation in the sale of securities and commodities, and gives the Attorney General extraordinary power to fight financial fraud.

    • Peat fires: emissions likely to worsen

      The horrific haze from Indonesia’s forest and peatland fires, started deliberately to clear land for planting and made worse by drought, has become a global crisis. Indonesia’s government could stop this annual catastrophe, but it so far seems to lack the political will to do so.

    • Indonesia’s forest fires will happen again

      The enormous forest fires that continue to rage in Indonesia are a tragedy for the environment, the economy, and for public health. And if regulatory steps aren’t taken, Brendan May argues, history will repeat itself. Here’s why.

    • Nasa releases carbon map that shows which countries are polluting the world

      As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere steadily rise, Nasa is warning that the capacity of Earth’s oceans, forests and land ecosystems to absorb human-generated carbon dioxide could one day dramatically weaken.

      Currently, the planet ‘breathes’ – forests, rainforests and oceans all absorb carbon dioxide, taking up about half of all human-emitted carbon.

    • State Newspapers Highlight Dangers Of Green-Lighting Offshore Drilling In The Atlantic Ocean

      In its draft leasing plan that will set the boundaries for oil development in federal waters from 2017 to 2022, the Obama Administration proposed allowing offshore drilling along the Atlantic Coast between Virginia and Georgia. Newspapers in the states that would be impacted by this plan have published articles and editorials highlighting local opposition and describing the economic and environmental risks associated with offshore drilling. As the administration approaches a final decision on offshore drilling, these concerns identified by state media outlets should inform national media coverage in the days and weeks ahead.

  • Finance

    • Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama Offers Helping Hand, Companies Give Cash To Support Democrats Backing Trade Pact

      After voting to give President Barack Obama the authority to strike new trade deals in the summer, House Democrats have enjoyed the warm, friendly embrace of the chief executive and a steady flow of cold, hard cash from the companies that are backing a massive agreement with Asia-Pacific nations. Obama, in a display of political acumen that often has eluded him in dealing with Congress, never stopped wooing members who supported him as he eyeballed the prize — ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — by the time he leaves office.

      Air Force One? At your service, congressman. Help on veterans’ issues? Done. A visit from a cabinet secretary? Of course. Financial support from business allies? Easy.

    • [Old but just re-edited] No to ACTA – Paris

      Jérémie Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net gave a speech and urged people to contact their legal representatives, in addition to protesting in the street…

    • David Brooks’ ‘$120,000 Vacation’ Is No Joke

      So at a time when 92 million Americans are out of the labor force, the highest number in four decades, 14.8 percent of the population live below the poverty line, which is $24, 250 for a family of four, when global inequality is skyrocketing such that just 80 billionaires now control the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, the fact that a supposedly “serious” columnist at the country’s “paper of record” thinks it’s cute to talk about how “sometimes it is the structure of things that you shall be pampered and you have no choice but to sit back and accept that fact” seems pretty darn unfunny.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Do the Kochs Have Their Own Spy Network?

      Five years ago, when The New Yorker published my piece “Covert Operations,” about the ambitious and secretive political network underwritten by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, the Koch brothers complained mightily about the story’s title, protesting that there was nothing at all covert about their political activities. Since then, the two have embarked on an impressive public-relations campaign meant to demonstrate their transparency and openness. But today, the Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel came out with a blockbuster scoop suggesting that the brothers, whose organization has vowed to spend an unprecedented eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars in the 2016 election cycle, are more involved in covert operations than even their own partners have known.

      After culling through the latest legally required disclosures, Vogel unearthed a new front group within the Kochs’ expanding network of affiliated nonprofit organizations—a high-tech surveillance and intelligence-gathering outfit devoted to stealthily tracking liberal and Democratic groups which Politico calls the “Koch Intelligence Agency.” The sleuthing operation reportedly includes twenty-five employees, one of whom formerly worked as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, and follows opponents by harvesting high-tech geodata from their social-media posts.

    • Obnoxious Neo-Con Plagiarist Robert Webb Quits the Labour Party

      A genuinely unpleasant person. I confess to a personal grudge against Webb, but it is a justified one. he was deeply involved in plagiarising my memoir, Murder in Samarkand for the BBC Comedy The Ambassador. The production company involved, Big Talk, had actually invited me to their offices for a meeting to ask me to sell them the rights to Murder in Samarkand. I attended the meeting but I refused to sell them the rights. They went ahead and made the series anyway.

    • Jim Naureckas on ISIS Attacks, Janet Redman on Climate Conference Activism

      We talk about the differing ways corporate media report terrorist violence with FAIR’s own Jim Naureckas.

  • Censorship

    • France Responds To Paris Attacks By Rushing Through Internet Censorship Law

      The attacks in Paris were a horrible and tragic event — and you can understand why people are angry and scared about it. But, as always, when politicians are angry and scared following a high-profile tragedy, they tend to legislate in dangerous ways. It appears that France is no exception. It has pushed through some kneejerk legislation that includes a plan to censor the internet. Specifically the Minister of the Interior will be given the power to block any website that is deemed to be “promoting terrorism or inciting terrorist acts.” Of course, this seems ridiculous on many levels.

    • Iran arrests cartoonist as crackdown on free expression goes on

      Iranian authorities have arrested a cartoonist and sent him to prison to complete a suspended jail sentence, his lawyer said on Tuesday, joining a growing list of journalists, artists and activists detained on security charges.

    • The Right to Be Forgotten: Why a New Artist’s Biggest Battle Is Finding a Way to Delete Their Past

      Remember Britannia High? 2008 UK’s answer to Fame? The just-before-primetime ITV song-and-dance debacle that was axed after one series? They were great days. The show, of course, was a complete disaster, both on a creative, commercial, in fact, every possible level.

      But if you examine audition footage of Britannia High on YouTube maybe you’ll start to wonder if the whole thing could have been rescued, had the show only made different casting decisions. Here, for instance, is a great singer who didn’t make the cut.

    • Judge Mocks Public Interest Concerns About Kicking People Off Internet, Tells Cox It’s Not Protected By The DMCA

      Judge Liam O’Grady — the same guy who helped the US government take all of Kim Dotcom’s stuff, is the judge handling the wacky Rightscorp-by-proxy lawsuit against Cox Communications. The key issue: Righscorp, on behalf of BMG and Round Hill Music flooded Cox Communications with infringement notices, trying to shake loose IP addresses as part of its shake down. Cox wasn’t very happy about cooperating, and in response BMG and Round Hill sued Cox, claiming that 512(i) of the DMCA requires ISPs to kick people off the internet if they’re found to be “repeat infringers.” Historically, it has long been believed that 512(i) does not apply to internet access/broadband providers like Cox, but rather to online service providers who are providing a direct service on the internet (like YouTube or Medium or whatever). However, the RIAA and its friends have hinted for a while that they’d like a court to interpret 512(i) to apply to internet access providers, creating a defacto “three strikes and you lose all internet access” policy. Rightscorp (with help from BMG and Round Hill Music) have decided to put that to the test.

    • For a few truly bad DMCA takedowns, YouTube offers to cover legal costs

      Four video creators will come under YouTube’s legal protection now, under a program unveiled today in a company blog post.

      “We are offering legal support to a handful of videos that we believe represent clear fair uses which have been subject to DMCA takedowns,” writes YouTube copyright lawyer Fred Von Lohmann. “With approval of the video creators, we’ll keep the videos live on YouTube in the U.S., feature them in the YouTube Copyright Center as strong examples of fair use, and cover the cost of any copyright lawsuits brought against them.”

    • Reuters Issues a Worldwide Ban on RAW Photos

      Reuters has implemented a new worldwide policy for freelance photographers that bans photos that were processed from RAW files. Photographers must now only send photos that were originally saved to their cameras as JPEGs.

    • Gmail Takes A Sledgehammer To The Techdirt Daily Newsletter When Not Even A Scalpel Is Needed

      Of course, being a collection of the previous day’s Techdirt posts, the Techdirt Daily email contains many, many links. Also, as it is something of a Techdirt policy to not spread malware to our readers, our writers are generally careful about the sites they link to in their posts. So, trying to track down which link might be to a site Google deems suspicious seemed daunting. But it turns out we didn’t have to look any further than the third post to figure out what happened, the title of which conveniently contains the word “malware.” Within that post, Tim Cushing included the domain name of a site that has been known in the past to distribute malware (in addition to squatting on a domain using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s name). It appears Google took that unlinked mention of the domain name as Techdirt carelessly endangering the digital lives of our newsletter subscribers, and stepped in to protect those subscribed via Gmail by throwing up the scary red warning banner and squashing every link in the email (even the unsubscribe link!).

  • Privacy

    • After Paris: Liberté demands unlimited encryption

      The neocons are at it again: After the tragedies of the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday (and Beirut the day before), they’re arguing that governments need to be able to access all communications from everyone, purportedly to protect us from future terrorist attacks. They’re making their case in leading newspapers and TV networks. Now they want to be able to break into encrypted communications on demand, over such services as Telegram or Apple Messages.

      Using the Paris attacks as a pretext to create an Orwellian police state is morally perverse, and we should not let fear stampede us to living in a police state.

    • Future iPhones could contain eye-tracking software

      The next generation of iPhones could contain software designed to track the path of your gaze, and only display notifications when your eyes are focused on a certain part of the display, a new patent has revealed.

      Filed by Apple in September 2012, the newly-granted patent outlines how a gaze detection device could delay the automated autocorrect of a misspelled word if it knew the user’s eye weren’t focused on the word, which it claims would be “more intuitive”.

      This could apply more widely to notifications, it suggests, delaying the delivery of a message notification until the user is paying attention to the display, minimising the risk of missing the message altogether.

    • Is There Any Evidence In The World That Would Convince Intelligence Community That More Surveillance Isn’t The Answer?

      We’ve already discussed how the usual surveillance state defenders quickly rushed into action following the Paris attacks to demand more surveillance — and also noted that the two attacks in Paris in the past year happened despite that country expanding its own surveillance laws twice in the past year (once right before the Charlie Hebdo attack and once soon after). And all of that raises a simple question in my mind:

      If the intelligence community and its supporters will call for greater surveillance and less encryption even after the surveillance capabilities have been shown not to work at all — is there any evidence at all that will convince them that maybe this is not the right idea? It’s a strange kind of argument that repeatedly points to its own failures… and follows it up with “well, that proves we need more of that!”

      Such an argument, by itself, seems self-refuting, because there is no other side. If things are working okay, call for more surveillance. If the surveillance doesn’t work, just call for more surveillance. It’s the default answer to anything, and thus these calls should be ignored. The fact that the surveillance community wants more power is not news and it’s not surprising. It’s not because of the Paris attacks — they’re always asking for this and they’ve mostly gotten it. And it didn’t work.

    • Why Is Facebook Inspecting Your Private Videos?

      In general, Facebook has some pretty decent copyright policies. If you upload content to Facebook and it’s removed because of a bogus takedown request, you can file a counter-notice via a form on Facebook’s website. If the claimant doesn’t take action against you in a federal court in 14 days, your content is restored. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and Facebook usually does it right. Unlike some platforms, it also doesn’t ding users as “repeat offenders” based on multiple phony claims.

    • A Major Shareholder Dumps His Facebook Stock, Should You?

      As far as financials go, the company has grown from $5 billion in revenue and an EPS of $0.01 at the beginning of this timeframe to a company analysts expect to report $17.5 billion and an EPS of $2.16 in the current fiscal year. All in all, it seems Facebook is moving from strength to strength.

    • Post-Snowden Cryptography

      Since June 2013 the world, and in particular the security world, has been shaken by the Snowden revelations. Bullrun is a programme by the NSA which includes as part of the Sigint Enabling Project to “Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems”, to “influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies” and to “shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS”. These are strong threats against cryptography in general and in particular against cryptography developed outside the US.

    • Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern

      Like clockwork, cynical calls to expand mass surveillance practices—by continuing the domestic telephone records collection and restricting access to strong encryption—came immediately following the Paris attacks. These calls came before the smoke had even cleared, much less before a serious investigation completed. They came from high places too, including CIA head John Brennan and New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

    • [Older] UN privacy chief: UK surveillance bill is ‘worse than scary’

      The UK government’s proposed surveillance legislation is “worse than scary”, the United Nations privacy chief has said.

      Joseph Cannataci, the UN’s special rapporteur on privacy, attacked the government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, saying he had never seen evidence that mass surveillance works. He also accused MPs of leading an “absolute offensive” and an “orchestrated” media campaign to distort the debate and take hold of new powers.

    • Founder of app used by ISIS once said ‘We shouldn’t feel guilty.’ On Wednesday he banned their accounts.

      Pavel Durov knew that terrorists might be using his app to communicate. And he decided it was something he could live with.

      “I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” the founder of Telegram, a highly secure messaging app, said at a TechCrunch panel in September when asked if he “slept well at night” knowing his technology was used for violence.

    • From Paris to Boston, Terrorists Were Already Known to Authorities

      WHENEVER A TERRORIST ATTACK OCCURS, it never takes long for politicians to begin calling for more surveillance powers. The horrendous attacks in Paris last week, which left more than 120 people dead, are no exception to this rule. In recent days, officials in the United Kingdom and the United States have been among those arguing that more surveillance of Internet communications is necessary to prevent further atrocities.

      The case for expanded surveillance of communications, however, is complicated by an analysis of recent terrorist attacks. The Intercept has reviewed 10 high-profile jihadi attacks carried out in Western countries between 2013 and 2015 (see below), and in each case some or all of the perpetrators were already known to the authorities before they executed their plot. In other words, most of the terrorists involved were not ghost operatives who sprang from nowhere to commit their crimes; they were already viewed as a potential threat, yet were not subjected to sufficient scrutiny by authorities under existing counterterrorism powers. Some of those involved in last week’s Paris massacre, for instance, were already known to authorities; at least three of the men appear to have been flagged at different times as having been radicalized, but warning signs were ignored.

    • Your Phone Is Listening—Literally Listening—to Your TV

      The TV is on in the background, and you’re replying to a quick email on your phone nearby. You don’t know it, but the devices are communicating. During a commercial, the TV emits an inaudible tone and your phone, which was listening for it, picks it up. Somewhere far away, a server makes a note: Both devices probably belong to you.

      This information about which devices belong to whom is immensely valuable to advertisers hoping to target ads specifically to you. In a simpler time, targeted marketing was easy. Most people had a computer at work and maybe another at home. If you sent an email about your new cat, ads for cat food started cropping up. If you searched for Thanksgiving recipes, Safeway coupons for turkeys appeared in your Facebook newsfeed.

    • NSA: Remember that mass email slurping we stopped? Well…

      Newly revealed documents (not from Snowden this time) show that the NSA has continued to collect Americans’ email traffic using overseas offices to get around curbs introduced domestically.

      Shortly after the September 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the NSA to collect bulk metadata on emails sent by Americans (although not the content) to help The War Against Terror (TWAT). The surveillance was authorized by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which mostly rubberstamped such requests.

      But the collection was stopped in 2011, the NSA said, although it still monitored emails from Americans to people outside the nation’s borders. However, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit started by The New York Times against the NSA’s Inspector General has uncovered documents showing that the NSA carried on collecting domestic data.

      To get around the restrictions on operating in the USA, the NSA simply started using its overseas offices to do the collection. Stations like RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire were tasked with collecting the metadata and feeding it back to the NSA headquarters in Maryland.

    • Don’t Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks

      Soon after John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took the stage on Wednesday, at the annual conference of the Overseas Security Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C., he suggested that members of the audience might be aware of certain remarks he’d made in the aftermath of ISIS’s assault on Paris last Friday. But he also thought that they might have figured him wrong: “I invite you to look at what I said as opposed to what has been unfortunately misrepresented in some quarters, by my friends in the fourth estate.”

      What had been reported was that Brennan had blamed Edward Snowden, at least in part, for the terrorist attack in Paris. What he said came in response to Josh Rogin, of Bloomberg View, who, on Monday, at a forum held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had asked about the blame for the attack. It was, of course, “primarily at the feet of the terrorists,” but nonetheless Rogin asked, “How was this allowed to happen? . . . What went wrong?” Brennan replied, “In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.” It is hard to tell the difference between that sentiment and the headline assessment that he had blamed Snowden—Brennan was not being particularly coy in his reference to “unauthorized disclosures.” As the Times wrote in an editorial, on Wednesday, “What he calls ‘hand-wringing’ was the sustained national outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans’ phone records.” James Woolsey, Brennan’s predecessor, was even more intemperate after the Paris attacks, saying that Snowden had “blood on his hands.” On Thursday, Woolsey added that Snowden should be “hanged.”

    • Encryption is not the enemy

      The terrorist attacks in Paris last week left people angry and fearful. But rather than listen to the age-old advice to never make decisions when you’re mad, too many American politicians and security officials have rushed to propose measures that further erode individual freedoms and, yes, security.

      In place of reasoned proposals that might actually improve security, knee-jerk reactions have centered on two areas: increasing government surveillance powers and banning encryption because terrorists use it to communicate.

    • Supporter Newsletter: November 2015

      But over the last couple of days, we’ve heard politicians call for the IPB to be fast tracked through Parliament and we’ve been asked what we think of this. We understand that people are rightly concerned about surveillance powers in the UK, but this is not the time to rush through legislation.

    • UK cops allegedly snooped on journalists to hunt down police whistleblower

      The UK’s Police Federation has written to the Independent Police Complaints Commission about the alleged use of the UK’s main surveillance law by Cleveland Police to snoop on three journalists, with the hope of using that surveillance to identify a whistleblower among its own ranks.

      The Federation, which is the staff association for all police constables, sergeants, and inspectors, claims that the phone records of a serving police officer, three journalists on The Northern Echo, a solicitor, and Police Federation representatives, were all targeted using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). As The Northern Echo writes, the alleged request to obtain phone data “was in part made to track down the source of a front-page story The Northern Echo ran in 2012, when it revealed an internal report at Cleveland Police had uncovered elements of institutional racism.”

      What makes the case particularly noteworthy is that the surveillance law allegedly used by Cleveland Police was not used to investigate a serious crime, but to winkle out a public-spirited whistleblower revealing possible problems in the same force. Arguably, Cleveland Police should have been pursuing those causing the problems instead.

  • Civil Rights

    • Stephen Colbert’s horrifying warning: Get used to President Trump

      For the first time ever, Donald Trump has captured 42 percent of Republican primary voters according to the latest poll that Stephen Colbert quoted on Tuesday night’s “Late Show.” If that freaks you out, you’re not alone. Colbert says that this has the Republican establishment shaking in their wingtips.

    • “The most heinous thing I have ever heard”: One Kansas woman’s ordeal over the use of medical marijuana

      You don’t want to be a medical marijuana patient in Kansas. You could face, arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and the loss of your children. Just ask Shona Banda, who endured the latest chapter of her ordeal Monday.

      The Garden City mother faces five marijuana-related charges, including three felonies, and had her 11-year-old son taken away by the state after the boy piped up during an anti-drug class at school to say that his mom “smokes a lot.”

    • TSA Protester Needs Your Help

      In 2012 John Brennan protested the TSA by stripping nude in an Oregon airport, his actions were ruled a fully legal protest under Oregon law. Despite that ruling, the TSA insists on fining him $500.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • So This Is How Net Neutrality Dies

      Ever since the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules went into effect earlier this year, we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The telecom industry and major internet service providers put considerable lobbying weight into stopping the FCC’s new rules—anyone paying attention knew that the industry’s initial loss wouldn’t be the end of this saga.

    • Comcast May Have Found a Major Net Neutrality Loophole

      Comcast may have found a major loophole in the Federal Communication Commission’s network neutrality regulations.

      Earlier this month the company launched a new streaming video service for Comcast broadband customers called Stream TV. The service, which is only available in the greater Boston and Chicago areas so far, allows you to watch HBO as well as live local television stations on your computer, tablet or laptop. The catch is that the service will only work from your home.

  • DRM

    • Apple boss says finding music online is too ‘difficult’ for women. Seriously

      It’s a problem we ladies just can’t wrap our silly little heads round – how on earth do we go about finding music online? You know, those things called songs to listen to when we’re with our girlfriends sobbing over having our fragile hearts broken by cruel boys.

      Well, fear not womankind – the answer is here. At least, according to Apple Music boss Jimmy Iovine it is. He went on CBS This Morning to helpfully explain how the product was inspired by his realisation that women needed help locating tunes on the actual real-life internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Is There Hope For Better WIPO Administration-Staff Relations?

      It is typical for the staff association at international organisations to vent complaints, but at the annual WIPO General Assembly held from 5-14 October, the WIPO association president used particularly strong language to describe the situation at the agency.

      “WIPO continues to go through some very difficult years,” the association president, Brett Fitzgerald, an American, said in a prepared statement [pdf] to the WIPO Coordination Committee in a closed session. The Coordination Committee is an important body of more than 80 out of the 188 members of WIPO.

    • EFF, Public Knowledge File Comments to Help Fix the Patent Office

      EFF and Public Knowledge filed comments today at the United States Patent and Trademark Office discussing proposed changes to Patent Office trials. Our comments focus on making the process more fair and accessible for small entities that need to challenge bad patents.

    • Copyrights

      • Movie Studio Will Interrogate Suspected Popcorn Time Users

        The makers of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler are allowed to interrogate Internet subscribers whose connections were used to pirate the film, a federal court has ruled. The filmmakers requested the depositions in order to discover the true identities of several Popcorn Time pirates.

      • State Board Moves to Sanction Prenda Lawyer

        John Steele and Paul Hansmeier formed a law firm which concentrated on copyright matters, which is to say, they sued John Does and sometimes individuals for allegedly downloading or sharing copyrighted pornographic videos. Steele Hansmeier became Prenda Law, which was succeeded by Hansmeier’s Alpha Law Firm. More recently, Paul Hansmeier’s law firm Class Justice has been suing small businesses for allegedly illegally discriminating against disabled people.

      • Rightscorp Burns $4 For Every Dollar Pirates Pay in Fines

        Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has just turned in another set of disappointing results for the third quarter of 2015. After losing $424K during the three months ended September 30, the company has recorded a net loss of $3.1m for 2015 thus far. That means that for every dollar it receives in fines, the company loses $4.

      • Republican candidate hit with ‘Eye of the Tiger’ copyright lawsuit

        The author of the hit song “Eye of the Tiger” has sued Republican presidential candidate hopeful Mike Huckabee for the alleged unauthorised use of the track at a rally against gay marriage.

        Frank Sullivan co-authored the song in his time with the band Survivor and established music label Rude Music, the plaintiff in the copyright claim.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts