Tag Archives: Internet Freedom

Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains

open quoteApparently, the folks at Homeland Security are not at all pleased with the very, very simple Firefox extension, called MAFIAAfire, that negates ICE’s domain seizures, by automatically rerouting users to alternate domains. Apparently, DHS demanded that Mozilla take the extension down from its listing of Firefox extensions claiming that the add-on “circumvented” DHS’s seizure orders. Thankfully, Mozilla didn’t just fold, but instead left it up and sent DHS a list of questions concerning the request. The list of questions is really fantastic, as it goes way beyond the direct request to really get to the heart of the questionable nature of ICE’s activity with domain seizures:

To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Security’s request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAfire.com add-on from Mozilla’s websites, can you please provide the following additional information:

1. Have any courts determined that MAFIAAfire.com is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)

2. Have any courts determined that the seized domains related to MAFIAAfire.com are unlawful, illegal or liable for infringement in any way? (please provide relevant rulings)

3. Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.

4. Has DHS, or any copyright owners involved in this matter, taken any legal action against MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domains, including DMCA requests?

5. What protections are in place for MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domain owners if eventually a court decides they were not unlawful?

6. Can you please provide copies of any briefs that accompanied the affidavit considered by the court that issued the relevant seizure orders?

7. Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down MAFIAAfire.com is based?

8. Please identify exactly what the infringements by the owners of the domains consisted of, with reference to the substantive standards of Section 106 and to any case law establishing that the actions of the seized domain owners constituted civil or criminal copyright infringement.

9. Did any copyright owners furnish affidavits in connection with the domain seizures? Had any copyright owners served DMCA takedown notices on the seized domains or MAFIAAfire.com? (if so please provide us with a copy)

10. Has the Government furnished the domain owners with formal notice of the seizures, triggering the time period for a response by the owners? If so, when, and have there been any responses yet by owners?

11. Has the Government communicated its concerns directly with MAFIAAfire.com? If so, what response, if any, did MAFIAAfire.com make?

It’s always nice to see some organizations not just roll over when the government comes calling. Kudos to Mozilla for not just refusing to takedown MAFIAAfire, but for also asking serious questions of DHS. Of course, DHS has refused to respond at all…close quote (Read more from techdirt.com)

The Government’s Case Against Julian Assange Is Falling Apart

Surprise, surprise.

open quoteIf you spend any time at all reading about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army private who stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of intelligence pulled from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Pentagon and the State Department, the picture that emerges is one of a young man who also felt isolated, one who saw WikiLeaks as a means of ameliorating that feeling. Manning remains in custody — a particularly brutal form of solitary confinement, actually — at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.

Manning still faces charges of his own, but he’s played a larger role in the tensions between U.S. government officials and WikiLeaks, in that he is seen as the key figure in building a larger criminal case against WikiLeaks founder and figurehead Julian Assange. That Manning willingly provided WikiLeaks with classified information does not appear to be in dispute. The issue, rather, is one of “did Manning jump or was he pushed?”

. . . .

This case against Assange — that he had pursued Manning, with the intention of inducing the soldier into proving WikiLeaks with thousands of classified diplomatic cables — relied heavily on the word of Adrian Lamo, a high-profile hacker-turned-“threat analyst,” to whom Manning reached out in May of 2010, revealing that he had taken classified material and leaked it to Assange. Lamo reported this to authorities, and provided the contents of his chat logs with Manning to Wired Magazine.close quote (Read more from huffingtonpost.com)

U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

open quoteThe US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain. close quote (Read more from torrentfreak.com)

Egyptian Protest Highlights

Pay attention the protester at 0:45 and his wholly secular message, contrary to CNN’s Muslim Brotherhood spin.

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Great photo collections here and here. Also, this video of protesters crossing a bridge and cops giving way before them demonstrates the scope of these protests.

There’s a good protest timeline on Al Jazeera, which is usually better than CNN.

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What do the protesters want? Don’t ask Biden.

The White House may stand behind the protesters in Tunisia, but demonstrators in Egypt haven’t gotten the presidential blessing. Appearing on PBS NewHour last night, gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden remarked that he doesn’t consider Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a dictator—despite his 29-year rule—and isn’t sure what exactly protesters want.

(source)

I wonder how much of the US’s luke warm view of the protests has to do with the Israel Lobby. I can imagine them wanting a tyrant whom the US more or less controls over a popular movement.

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Obviously, government repression doesn’t like internet freedom of information. By the way:

Internet ‘kill switch’ bill will return
open quoteA controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year. . . . Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure.close quote (Read more from news.cnet.com)

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Riot control agents used against the Egyptian protests seem to be Made in the USA. Are you proud, chest-thumbing neo-cons? Wait, don’t answer that.

See Also:
open quoteThe US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to equip the Egyptian security forces with high-tech military hardware.

But unless things get really, really bad there, it’s unlikely that any big-ticket American military hardware will be used directly against the Egyptian demonstrators. A selection of Defense Department contracts dating to the mid-1990s reveals weapons sales to Egypt that include a Black Hawk helicopters (Sikorsky), a dizzying variety of missiles (Raytheon), Abrams tanks (General Dynamics), Humvees (AM General Corp.) and all manner of ammunition. . . .

Now, if through some incredible circumstance Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decides to flee the country, à la Ben Ali, there’s a good chance his first-class flight would come courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Pentagon contracts show that the US government has spent at least $111,160,328 to purchase and maintain Mubarak’s fleet of nine Gulfstream business jets. (For those keeping score, Gulfstream is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.)close quote (Read more from warisbusiness.com)

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US subpoenas Wikileaks tweets

Intellectual Property helps makes this behavior possible. In an IP-free world, people could more easily abandon a company that cooperates with abusive governments (like ours), but in our world, where ideas are considered property, and imitation can be halted by means of government violence, it is much less likely companies will have a reason to resist such invasive actions.

open quotehe US government has subpoenaed Twitter in a bid to support an ongoing criminal investigation into whether Wikileaks and people involved or connected to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic member of parliament, broke the law.

According to Wikileaks lawyer Mark Stephens live on the BBC News a short time ago, it is believed Facebook and Google (see here) have also been contacted regarding Wikileaks members and potential whistleblowers.

Update (12:20am GMT): Mark Stephens on the BBC News also makes clear that the court order will also cover the “600,000 odd followers that Wikileaks has on Twitter“.close quote (Read more from zdnet.com)

FBI Raids ISPs Trying to Track Down ‘Anonymous’

open quoteEfforts to track down the “Anonymous” group involved in the Operation Payback DDoS attacks have included an FBI raid against a Texas-based server-hosting company according to recent reports.

Other raids have been reported in Germany and British Columbia relating to the attacks, but they don’t appear to have led to any new arrests. So far the arrest of a 16 year old Dutchman for his involvement in the attacks was the only one which has come.

But the documents suggest that the FBI is really keen on tracking down those involved, and has been targeting the IP addresses used in the organization of the attacks. Officials have declined comment on what information was garnered from the seizure of servers involved.

Though “Anonymous” predates the recent high-profile attacks, the organization’s use of a “voluntary botnet” to attack the websites of organizations which have moved against WikiLeaks has garnered them enormous media attention, as well as attention from law enforcement. The group briefly downed the websites of Visa and MasterCard early in December.close quote (Read more from news.antiwar.com)

FCC Moves to Regulate the Internet

The Federal Communications Commission is set to begin a move to regulate the Internet.

According to CNSNews.com, by a “3-2 party-line vote on Thursday at the FCC,” the agency “began the formal process of reclassifying the Internet as a telecommunications service instead of an information service — it’s current classification.”

Currently, as an information service, the FCC can exercise only “ancillary” authority, which does not allow it to regulate the Internet directly. If the Internet is reclassified, the agency would gain greater regulatory control.
(Read more from thenewamerican.com)

Senate Bill Would Give Obama Internet ‘Kill Switch’

The introduction of a new Senate bill, S.3480, dubbed the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010,” is sparking concerns about a massive power grab over the Internet under the guise of “national security.”

The bill, proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I – CT) claims the entire Internet, the whole global computer network and everything on it, as a “national asset” of the United States, and seeks to give President Obama the power to seize control over broad swaths of it with no oversight during a “National Cyber Emergency,” which would itself be something the president would be able to declare at any time. (Read more from news.antiwar.com)

Why is it that whenever a bill seems diabolically Orwellian, Joe Lieberman is either sponsor or co-sponsor?

Oh Noz! The FTC doesn’t like sites like Lost Republic

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking ways to “reinvent” journalism, and that’s a cause for concern. According to a May 24 draft proposal, the agency thinks government should be at the center of a media overhaul. The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC’s policy staff fears this new reality.

“There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism,” the report states. With no faith that the market will work things out for the better, government thinks it must come to the rescue. (Read more from washingtontimes.com)

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

“Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

” (Read more from andreworlowski.com)

See Also:
Google ready to pursue its agenda in Washington Its employees supported Obama, and four Googlers served on his transition team. Now the Internet giant hopes to win support for network neutrality and expanding high-speed Internet access. (Read more from latimes.com)

Censoring the Internet

–Verizon shuts down access to Usenet
   “Verizon has announced that they will be stopping access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas including the very popular alt.* groups that have been around since the late 1980s.
   Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said only a select few newsgroups/discussion groups would be offered to customers going into the future. It appears the decision is in response to political ‘strong-arming’ from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who wants strong restrictions on all newsgroups.
   Cuomo added that his office had found child porn on at least 88 newsgroups, although that percentage is tiny compared to the over 90,000 newsgroups that exist.”

–Free Nationwide Wi-Fi Network To Censor Political Websites
   “Two competing parties, M2Z Networks and the FCC, are jockeying for the rights to roll out the network, but both have already stated their intent to install filters that block out pornography and anything else deemed ‘harmful’.
   According to a Daily Tech report, ‘Both proposals stipulate that any free wireless offerings have mandatory content filters, preventing users from viewing any material that ‘would be harmful to teens and adolescents,’ including pornography and anything ‘contemporary community standards� deem as obscene. Free-speech advocates call this condition unconstitutional.'”

I predicted this in my Five Predictions for 2008.