Category Archives: Issues

Hollywood’s war against Google

Ars Technica reports: Tensions between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood exploded into public view this week, as Google filed court papers seeking to halt a broad subpoena Hood sent to the company.

The Hood subpoena, delivered in late October, didn’t come out of nowhere. Hood’s investigation got revved up after at least a year of intense lobbying by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). E-mails that hackers acquired from Sony Pictures executives and then dumped publicly now show the inner workings of how that lobbying advanced—and just how extensive it was. Attorneys at Sony were on a short list of top Hollywood lawyers frequently updated about the MPAA’s “Attorney General Project,” along with those at Disney, Warner Brothers, 21st Century Fox, NBC Universal, and Paramount.

The e-mails show a staggering level of access to, and influence over, elected officials. The MPAA’s single-minded obsession: altering search results and other products (such as “autocompleted” search queries) from Google, a company the movie studios began referring to as “Goliath” in around February 2014. The studios’ goal was to quickly get pirated content off the Web; unhappy about the state of Google’s voluntary compliance with their demands and frustrated in their efforts at passing new federal law such as SOPA and PIPA, the MPAA has turned instead to state law enforcement.

The most controversial elements of SOPA/PIPA would have let content owners effectively shut down websites they said were infringing their copyrights or trademarks. This already happens—think of various peer-to-peer sites that no longer exist—but it usually involves drawn-out litigation. SOPA promised a faster-moving process that would have essentially made rights holders a website’s judge, jury, and executioner.

To get the same results in a post-SOPA world, MPAA has hired some of the nation’s most well-connected lawyers. The project is spearheaded by Thomas Perrelli, a Jenner & Block partner and former Obama Administration lawyer. Perrelli has given attorneys general (AGs) across the country their talking points, suggesting realistic “asks” prior to key meetings with Google. Frustrated with a lack of results, Perrelli and top MPAA lawyers then authorized an “expanded Goliath strategy” in which they would push the AGs to move beyond mere letter writing. Instead, they would seek full-bore investigations against Google.

If the AGs felt short on resources—well, Hollywood studios could help with that. Money from Sony and other Big Six studios was available to draft the actual subpoenas, to research legal theories to prosecute Google, to spread negative press about the search giant, and to reach out to other state AGs that might join with Hood.

This is how the project unfolded over the past year. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS targets Afghanistan just as the U.S. quits

The Daily Beast reports: Few sayings of the Prophet Mohammed have a stronger hold on the imagination of the world’s jihadists than his prophecy about the flags: “If you see the black banners coming from Khorasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice,” he is supposed to have admonished the faithful. “No power will be able to stop them and they will finally reach Baitul Maqdisi”—Jerusalem— “where they will erect flags.”

And where was this magical land of Khorasan, whence the conquerors would come? Think Afghanistan and pieces of all the countries that surround it, including and especially Iran.

For the great ideologues of modern jihadist terror, Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of the so-called Islamic State, the strategic and symbolic importance of Khorasan is huge, and there are already signs that they are competing for control there. Some factions of both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and some members of al Qaeda in the area have pledged allegiance to Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Zawahiri’s most elite group of operatives, meanwhile, has become known as the Khorasan Group.

As terrorists compete for prestige and authority, they are under attack by the governments of the region. To make their mark on the minds of potential followers, they carry out ever more desperate and horrifying acts, like the slaughter of children at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, earlier this week.

A central figure in these dangerous wider developments is a soft-spoken scholar, journalist and poet, Sheikh Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who spent more than three years as a prisoner of the Americans at Guantanamo, then found himself imprisoned again by the Pakistanis. News reports in the region recently named his as the Islamic State-appointed governor or wali of Khorasan. [Continue reading…]

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Boko Haram now appears intent on governing

The Wall Street Journal reports: After seizing another village in Nigeria’s northeast last month, Boko Haram militants took a step in their transition from terror group to governing authority. They rounded up the men and ordered them to wear pants as the prophet Mohammed did, several inches above the ankle.

Otherwise, a Boko Haram commander told a crowd of men, they would be killed. “So we folded our trousers,” said Birgamus Kadams, a 26-year-old who was among the group of several hundred residents of Garkidi village the militant addressed.

Like 1.5 million other Nigerians, Mr. Kadams fled his home, in his case to the government-held town of Yola. But the world he left behind is changing.

After years of sowing chaos—bombing mosques, gunning up markets, kidnapping children, and leaving thousands dead, Boko Haram now appears intent on establishing order in towns it holds.

Fighters are imposing rigorous Islamic law in a bid to carve out a corner of a strategic, oil-rich country—just as its fellow jihadists in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are doing. [Continue reading…]

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How the internet undermines the value of talking

Nick Bilton writes: According to a producer in Hollywood, people have been staying clear of email and opting for cellphones over the past two weeks as studios have been bolstering firewalls and email systems. “Everyone has been doing business on their cellphone since this happened,” the person said, asking not to be named. “The reality is, every studio has emails in their system that would cause the [same] chaos if they came out.”

Or as Jenni Konner, a writer and executive producer for HBO’s “Girls,” said on Twitter Tuesday night: “The worst thing about the Sony hacks is people using the phone again.”

It’s not only people in Hollywood who are picking up the phone again in case of an email hack.

For the rest of us, the Sony hacking is just another example of how our emails are highly insecure. “Don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times the next day,” said Brian Krebs, who specializes in cybercrime and operates the website Krebs on Security. “It’s like putting a postcard in the mail.”

“And you can’t unsay anything you’ve said on the Internet,” Mr. Krebs added.

What’s so terrible about having to use the phone?

I know — it requires that massively inconvenient social accommodation which requires people to share time.

Nowadays everyone thinks they should be able to control their own time without engaging in submissive forms of behavior like answering phone calls.

Text allows people to connect without sharing space or time.

The sacrifice however, is that text lacks the fluidity of speech. What is said can instantly be modified, modulated and shaped within the flow of conversation.

Instead of bemoaning the inconvenience of talking, maybe its time for everyone to reacquaint themselves with its value.

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Lessons from the Sony hack

Peter W. Singer and Allan Friedman write: The hack of Sony has often been lumped in with stories ranging from run of the mill online credit card theft to the Target, Home Depot and JP Morgan breaches to the time that Iranian-linked hackers allegedly “erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs.” In fact, most of these crimes have little more in common than the fact that they were committed using computers. It’s a lot like lumping together every incident in New York that involves a gun, whether it’s a bank robbery, a murder or a football player accidentally shooting himself.

What made the Sony hack distinct is that it mixed an evidently organized effort, using advanced tools (what is known as an “advanced persistent threat”) that some have linked to the North Korean state, but with the goal of maximizing attention and embarrassment for the target. That is, they weren’t a few hackers phishing after any target, nor were they trying to keep quiet, so that they could continue to secretly exfiltrate data. Rather, they appear to have wanted to cause havoc — and make sure everyone knew.

Differentiating between these kinds of threats is critical, because different risks require different types of responses. The claims some have made that the Sony hack is an act of “cyberterrorism” are a case in point. The FBI definition of cyberterrorism requires “an act that results in violence,” which stealing scripts about James Bond carrying out acts of violence wouldn’t meet. This also applies to the recent threats by the hackers to create 9/11 style events at any movie theater that shows the film. Rapidly becoming an illustration on how not to handle online threats, virtually all the major U.S. theater companies have now said they won’t show the movie. Yet the ability to steal gossipy celebrity emails is clearly not the same as having the capacity to undertake physical attacks at thousands of movie theaters across the country. So, at least based on their actions so far, the “bitter fate” the hackers promised moviegoers is most likely to be the price they pay for popcorn. [Continue reading…]

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Apple ‘failing to protect Chinese factory workers’

BBC News reports: Poor treatment of workers in Chinese factories which make Apple products has been discovered by an undercover BBC Panorama investigation.

Filming on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken.

It found standards on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories.

Apple said it strongly disagreed with the programme’s conclusions.

Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off. [Continue reading…]

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Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the senior officer at the center of the CIA’s torture scandals

Glenn Greenwald and Peter Maass report: NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.

The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.

The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts. [Continue reading…]

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CIA analysis: ‘high-value targeting’ had limited effect against Taliban

The Washington Post reports: Raids, drone strikes and other military operations designed to capture or kill “high-value targets” in the Taliban have had little overall effect in part because of the militant group’s ability to replace leaders, according to a 2009 CIA analysis newly released by WikiLeaks.

The document, titled “Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool,” is dated July 7, 2009, and was produced as the Obama administration grappled with whether to send additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan to launch widespread counterinsurgency operations and train the Afghan police and military. In December 2009, President Obama sent an additional 30,000 U.S. troops in to do just that, expanding the American military presence to more than 100,000 service members.

The CIA analysis released Thursday provides a new snapshot into the intelligence the White House and Pentagon were working with at the time. It acknowledges that “high-value targeting” had been conducted against the Taliban only on an intermittent basis at that point, with limited effect. Counterinsurgency operations conducted against the Taliban to that point had moderate effect, according to the report. The report also examined how the issue of targeting high-value enemy figures played out in other conflicts, including in Northern Ireland and Algeria. [Continue reading…]

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Backed by U.S. airstrikes, Kurds break ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar

The New York Times reports: Kurdish forces, backed by a surge of American airstrikes in recent days, recaptured a large swath of territory from Islamic State militants on Thursday, opening a path from the autonomous Kurdish region to Mount Sinjar in the west, near the Syrian border.

The two-day offensive, which involved 8,000 fighters, known as pesh merga, was the largest one to date in the war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, according to Kurdish officials. It was also a successful demonstration of President Obama’s strategy for battling the extremist group: American air power combined with local forces doing the fighting on the ground.

A statement released Thursday night by the office of Masrour Barzani, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Security Council, called the operation “the single biggest military offensive against ISIS, and the most successful.” [Continue reading…]

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I’m a soldier, I have no regrets, says ISIS Twitter promoter @ShamiWitness

The Times of India reports: “I’m a soldier and messenger. I don’t regret what I’ve done,” Mehdi Masroor Biswas, 24, told an advocate as a posse of policemen escorted him out of court hall 49, Civil Court Complex, Bengaluru, on Thursday.

Mehdi, arrested for operating a pro-ISIS Twitter handle, was remanded to 15 days in police custody by special judge Somaraju. One of the advocates asked Mehdi outside the courtroom, “Why did you do this, man?” Mehdi replied he had no regrets.

His parents were present in the courtroom. West Bengal-born Mehdi was as a management executive in an MNC, and allegedly worked as an ISIS propaganda activist, tweeting and retweeting thousands of messages. Arrested in the early hours of Saturday, Mehdi was produced before court on Thursday when his five-day police custody ended. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s emerging police state

Sinem Adar writes: When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected president this summer, the future of the Turkey seemed one of anxieties and unknowns. Since then, the political scene has been overwhelmed by growing despotic state power that functions through intense securitisation of state-society relations, on one hand, and an increasingly salient public discourse of morality that takes religion as its primary reference, on the other. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government was shaken, one year ago by a corruption scandal. As of today, there has been no prosecution process over corruption allegations.

This massive corruption scandal was the peak point of the struggle between once-allies Erdogan and his cronies, on one hand, and the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, whose name is associated with the leadership of the Hizmet movement. What followed was an extended crackdown on dissent, which is still going on.

The AKP government immediately responded to the corruption allegations by relocating and firing officers within the police force involved with the case. In addition, the public prosecutors working on the corruption lawsuits were relocated as well. [Continue reading…]

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Last year, the world pumped out more carbon pollution than ever before

Motherboard reports: Precisely at the moment that the climate depends on carbon pollution declining, worldwide emissions continue to boom. Case in point: 2013 saw yet another record carbon high, with 35.3 billion tons of CO2 entering the atmosphere.

That’s the finding of ​the European Union’s​ Joint Research Center, which released its annual report on global emissions today. The document tallies the emissions of fossil fuel power production—coal, oil, and gas—and emissions from industry, especially cement and metal manufacturing.

The record high was reached primarily thanks to developing, coal-hungry giants: “Sharp risers include Brazil (+ 6.2 percent), India (+ 4.4 percent), China (+ 4.2 percent) and Indonesia (+2.3 percent),” the report notes.

The US — the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter — grew again after a brief pause, thanks to a return to coal. [Continue reading…]

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Sony leaks reveal Hollywood is trying to break the internet

The Verge reports: Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that’s sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that’s currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place?

To do that, the MPAA’s lawyers would target the Domain Name System (DNS) that directs traffic across the internet. The tactic was first proposed as part of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2011, but three years after the law failed in Congress, the MPAA has been looking for legal justification for the practice in existing law and working with ISPs like Comcast to examine how a system might work technically. If the system works, DNS-blocking could be the key to the MPAA’s long-standing goal of blocking sites from delivering content to the US. At the same time, it represents a bold challenge to the basic engineering of the internet, threatening to break the very backbone of the web and drawing the industry into an increasingly nasty fight with Google. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. will veto Palestinian UN bid

Ben Caspit writes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry met in Rome on Dec. 15, in an effort to formulate a joint position in response to planned moves by the Palestinians at the United Nations in the coming weeks.

Following the meeting, the big question still lingered: Would the Americans cast a veto over a potential Palestinian request that the United Nations’ Security Council recognize Palestine as an independent state? Netanyahu did not divulge to reporters who accompanied him on the plane whether he received an American guarantee for the sought-after veto. White House officials said the issue was still being debated.

On the night of Dec. 16, however, it became known that the decision has been made. The Americans will indeed cast a veto over the Palestinian request. This veto will be welcomed with satisfaction in Jerusalem. Surprisingly enough, Ramallah will also receive it with understanding. [Continue reading…]

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‘Shadowy’ anti-net neutrality group submitted 56.5% of comments to FCC

Ars Technica reports: “A shadowy organization with ties to the Koch Brothers” spearheaded an anti-net neutrality form letter writing campaign that tipped the scales against net neutrality proponents, according to an analysis released today by the Sunlight Foundation.

The first round of comments collected by the Federal Communications Commission were overwhelmingly in support of net neutrality rules. But a second round of “reply comments” that ended September 10 went the other way, with 60 percent opposing net neutrality, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The group describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to expand access to government records.

The foundation used natural language processing techniques to analyze 1.6 million reply comments.

“In marked contrast to the first round, anti-net neutrality commenters mobilized in force for this round, and comprised the majority of overall comments submitted, at 60 percent,” the Sunlight Foundation wrote. “We attribute this shift almost entirely to the form-letter initiatives of a single organization, American Commitment, who are single-handedly responsible for 56.5 percent of the comments in this round.” [Continue reading…]

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Earth faces sixth ‘great extinction’ with 41% of amphibians set to go the way of the dodo

The Observer reports: A stark depiction of the threat hanging over the world’s mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other life forms has been published by the prestigious scientific journal, Nature. A special analysis carried out by the journal indicates that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet now face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are similarly threatened.

Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.

In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.

“Habitat destruction, pollution or overfishing either kills off wild creatures and plants or leaves them badly weakened,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. “The trouble is that in coming decades, the additional threat of worsening climate change will become more and more pronounced and could then kill off these survivors.” [Continue reading…]

Miles King writes: Humans are “the ultimate invasive species” having spread from Africa to every corner of the planet (and beyond) in 100,000 years. In doing so, we have removed the habitats of other species, or affected them by moving other invasive species around, causing pollution and driving climate change. We do so at our peril, because humans depend on nature utterly for our survival.

If it is possible to stop this mass extinction, humans need to take rapid and radical action.

Here are five actions that I think will be needed: [Continue reading…]

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Republicans strongly pro-torture, Democrats divided

Pew Research Center reports: Following the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation practices in the period following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 51% of the public says they think the CIA methods were justified, compared with just 29% who say they were not justified; 20% do not express an opinion.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Dec. 11-14 among 1,001 adults, finds that amid competing claims over the effectiveness of CIA interrogation methods, 56% believe they provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, while just half as many (28%) say they did not provide this type of intelligence.

Partisan divides on these questions are wide. A large majority of Republicans (76%) say the interrogation methods used by the CIA after 9/11 were justified. Democrats are divided – 37% say the methods were justified, while 46% disagree. About twice as many liberal Democrats (65%) as conservative and moderate Democrats (32%) say the CIA’s interrogation techniques were not justified. [Continue reading…]

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