The British Tabloid Phone-Hacking Scandal: Via NYTimes.com Magazine.

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.

The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet circle. They began to suspect that someone was eavesdropping on their private conversations.

By early January 2006, Scotland Yard had confirmed their suspicions. An unambiguous trail led to Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter who covered the royal family, and to a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who also worked for the paper. The two men had somehow obtained the PIN codes needed to access the voice mail of the royal aides.

Scotland Yard told the aides to continue operating as usual while it pursued the investigation, which included surveillance of the suspects’ phones. [ Read more ... ]

Murdoch Reporters’ Phone-Hacking Was Endemic, Victimized Hundreds: Via Threat Level.

A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted, according toThe New York Times.

Andy Coulson, currently media advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is accused of having encouraged the hacking during his tenure as editor of Murdoch’s News of the World paper.

According to the N.Y. Times, reporters working under Coulson targeted hundreds of victims — from Princes Harry and William to government and police officials and numerous celebrities, including soccer star David Beckham and his wife.

Most of the victims are only now learning that their phone voicemail accounts may have been accessed by reporters, four years after the investigation first launched. One young woman, who had previously been the victim in a high-profile sexual-assault case when she was 19, only recently received a letter confirming that her phone number was on a list of potential hack targets kept by News of the World employees. [ Read more ... ]

Pirate Bay Documentary in the Works: Via Threat Level.

Notorious filesharing website The Pirate Bay is a long-standing enemy of the movie industry, but one Swedish filmmaker has plans to create a documentary called TPB AFK about the three founders of the site, and their reactions to being found guilty of being accessory to crime against copyright law and fined about $3.6 million.

The director, Simon Klose, who has a law degree, has 200 hours of footage saved up and plans to record more during the trio’s appeal against their verdict, which is set for less than a month from now, on 28 September, 2010. In three days, he raised nearly $30,000 on Kickstarter to pay for a professional editor and use of an editing suite in putting together what he described as a “complex story”.

The documentary’s name, Klose says, is a reference to how the site’s founders had to confront reality: “AFK is computer slang for being offline, so TPB AFK is the story about a group of people in a digital community who, at times, are forced to leave the internets and deal with life offline — away from keyboard.” [ Read more ... ]

Good News: Security Researcher Released on Bail: Via EFF.org Updates.

Hari Prasad, the Indian security researcher arrested for allegedly stealing an electronic voting machine, has been released on bail.

Earlier this year, an anonymous source gave the machine to Prasad and a team of researchers, who discovered critical security flaws. Under questioning by authorities last weekend, Prasad refused to divulge the identity of the source who gave them the machine. He was then arrested and reportedly charged with theft and trespass on the theory that he stole the machine himself.

According to the Indian news agency PTI, the magistrate who released Prasad on bail noted that "no offence was disclosed with Hari Prasad's arrest and even if it was assumed that [the electronic voting machine] was stolen it appears that there was no dishonest intention on his part...he was trying to show how [electronic voting] machines can be tampered with."

The court reportedly also asked the Election Commission of India to confirm or disprove Prasad's claim that the country's electronic voting machines can be compromised. If Prasad's claims are false, action could be taken against him, the magistrate said.

Read Original Article:(Via EFF.org Updates.)

Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody: Via Freedom to Tinker.

FLASH: 4:47 a.m. EDT August 28 — Indian e-voting researcher Hari Prasad was released on bail an hour ago, after seven days in police custody. Magistrate D. H. Sharma reportedly praised Hari and made strong comments against the police, saying Hari has done service to his country. Full post later today.

Read Original Article:(Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Update: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody: Via Freedom to Tinker.

In case you're just tuning in, e-voting researcher Hari Prasad, with whom I coauthored a paper exposing serious flaws in India's electronic voting machines (EVMs), was arrested Saturday morning at his home in Hyderabad. The arresting officers told him they were acting under "pressure [from] the top," and demanded that he disclose the identity of the anonymous source who provided the voting machine that we studied. Since then, Hari has been held in custody by the Mumbai police and repeatedly questioned.

Recent Developments

There have several developments in Hari’s case since my last post.

On Sunday, about 28 hours after his arrest, Hari appeared before a magistrate in Mumbai and was formally charged for the first time. The officers who arrested him had not stated a specific charge, but they had told him he would be left alone if he would reveal the identity of the source who provided us the machine . Hari has not named the source, and the authorities are now alleging that he took the machine from the government's warehouse himself. [ Read more ... ]

Privacy in Peril: Lawyers, Nations Clamor for Google Wi-Fi Data: Via Threat Level.

A hard drive with perhaps several hundred gigabytes of internet surfers’ private data resides under lock and key in a Portland, Oregon, federal courthouse.

Regulators and private lawyers across Europe and the United States are demanding, and in some cases obtaining, access to data that Google sniffed for the past three years from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots across the globe.

The requests are coming in some of the eight proposed class actions targeting Google that have cropped up across the United States, as well as from as from various governments investigating whether Google violated their laws.

The demands for data raise a paradox of sorts: How many eyeballs, in the name of privacy, will eventually see the data that likely includes snippets of e-mail, web surfing, documents and other private data? [ Read more ... ]

Pirate Bay Appeal Judges Cleared of Bias: Via Threat Level.

Sweden’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that two of the three judges set to preside over The Pirate Bay’s copyright conviction appeal are not biased, despite their membership in pro-copyright groups.

The decision clears the way for expected oral arguments sometime this fall before a three-judge appellate panel weighing last year’s criminal and civil convictions of The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders, Swedish radio reports.

In April 2009, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the operation. Stayed pending the outcome of appeals, they were sentenced each to one year in prison and fined a combined $3.9 million. [ Read more ... ]

Malware Threatens to Sue BitTorrent Downloaders: Via Wired: Threat Level.

A new malware scam is trying to dupe BitTorrent users into coughing up serious cash for illegally downloading copyrighted material.

The code displays a box with the message “Warning! Piracy detected!” and opens a web page purportedly run by a Swiss company “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright.”

The fake company, the ICCP Foundation, also claims to be backed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and others. “It appears to scan the user’s hard drive for .torrent files and displays these as  ’evidence’ of an earlier infringement,” wrote TorrentFreak, which first disclosed the malware.

Victims are are warned of possible imprisonment and fines, and given the option of “settling” the “case” for a one-time payment of $400, by credit card. [ Read more ... ]

Case Report – BCCA says aerial surveillance by telphoto zoom lens not a search « All About Information: Via A legal blog about the law of information – By Toronto, Ontario lawyer Dan Michaluk.

Today, the British Columbia Court of Appeal held that the police did not violate section 8 of the Charter by conducting aerial surveillance of a rural property from in excess of 1000 feet by using a digital camera equipped with a telephoto lens. [ Read more ... ]

The dark side of DNA: Via The Globe and Mail.

The only real evidence in a first-degree murder charge against Mr. Turner, the golden sheen of DNA appeared certain to become a silver bullet in the hands of the Crown.

"I told my lawyer, Jerome Kennedy, that there was no way in the world it was true," Mr. Turner recalled in an interview. "He believed me. He said that I was too stupid to commit that crime and leave no evidence."

A lucky hunch by Mr. Kennedy - now Newfoundland's Minister of Health - saved Mr. Turner from a life behind bars. He sought the name and DNA profile of every technician who had worked at the RCMP lab. It turned out that the technician who had tested the ring had also been working on the victim's fingernails a few inches away, creating a strong possibility of contamination.

The technician conceded at Mr. Turner's 2001 trial that she had also contaminated evidence in two previous cases. [ Read more ... ]

The Beginning of the End of Data Retention: Via EFF.org Updates.

Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.

When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers' activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.

The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. [ Read more ... ]

Italy Convicts Google Execs To Protect Privacy: Via NPR.

Europeans are debating the overall reach of the Internet into their lives. An Italian court recently convicted three Google executives for privacy violations after a clip was posted on Google Video showing a disabled student being bullied by classmates in Turin. The ruling highlights a deep trans-Atlantic cultural gap: Americans see the ruling as undermining the concept of freedom of expression, while Europeans put privacy first — they consider it a fundamental human right. [ Read more ... ]

In Italian Google Case, American and European Ideas of Privacy Collide: Via NYTimes.com .

“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, [ Read more ... ]

Italian Court Finds Google Violated Privacy: Via NYT > Privacy.

Google said the case, involving a video of bullying, could undermine freedom of expression on the Internet.

MILAN — Three Google executives were convicted Wednesday of violating Italian privacy laws in a ruling that the company denounced as an “astonishing” attack on freedom of expression on the Internet.

The case involves online videos showing an autistic boy being bullied by classmates in Turin, which were posted in 2006 on Google Video, an online video-sharing service that Google ran before its acquisition of YouTube.

Prosecutors charged that the videos violated Italian personal privacy protections. They said the clips were removed only after complaints from Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned in the videos.

“We are definitely satisfied that someone has to take responsibility for this violation of privacy,” said Guido Camera, a lawyer for Vivi Down. [ Read more ... ]

Our human rights vs. The Others: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below - Update II)

Ten American Baptists were arrested two weeks ago in Haiti on charges that they exploited the chaos in that country by attempting to smuggle 33 young Haitian children across the border without permission -- either to bring them to a life of Christianity or (as some evidence suggests) to filter them into a child trafficking ring.  National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez is deeply upset by the plight of at least one of the detained Americans, Jim Allen, whom she contends (based exclusively on his family's claims) is innocent.  Lopez demands that the State Department do more to "insist" upon Allen's release, and -- most amazingly of all -- complains about the conditions of his detention.   She has the audacity to cite a Human Rights Watch description of prison conditions in Haiti as "inhumane."  Lopez complains that Allen was waterboarded, stripped, frozen and beaten has "hypertension," was shipped thousands of miles away to a secret black site beyond the reach of the ICRC and then rendered to Jordan allowed to speak to his wife only once in the first ten days of his confinement, and was consigned to years in an island-prison cage with no charges denied his choice of counsel for a few days (though he is now duly represented in Haitian courts by a large team of American lawyers). [ Read more ... ]

British Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In Extraordinary Rendition Case: Via American Civil Liberties Union.

Ruling May Affect British Resident's Case In ACLU Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary For Its Role In Unlawful Extraordinary Rendition Program 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union commended today's ruling by a British court that the British government must release evidence of torture in the case of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was captured in Pakistan and detained in Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay as part of the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program. While in detention, Mohamed was subjected to physical and psychological abuse by his captors. Upon his release, Mohamed sought documents from the British government that would confirm that U.K. officials were aware of and complicit in his abuse by U.S. forces. Today's ruling orders the disclosure of seven previously suppressed paragraphs from an earlier court ruling that summarize British government documents related to Mohamed's detention and torture while under the control of U.S. authorities. [ Read more ... ]

Sweden Probing Cisco, NASA Hacks: Via Threat Level.

Swedish investigators are probing a hacker U.S. authorities accuse of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, the authorities said Monday.

Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as “Stakkato,” allegedly seized computer code that controls internet traffic. After the 2004 breach of Cisco, the proprietary source code for Cisco’s IOS operating system was discovered on a Russian website.

Pettersson was indicted in the United States in May on five hacking counts, (.pdf) but could not be brought from Sweden to the United States for trial. Sweden does not extradite its own citizens, but said it was examining whether to prosecute him in Sweden after U.S. authorities in San Francisco initiated that request. [ Read more ... ]

Europe Looms as Major Battleground for Google: Via NYT > Privacy.

PARIS — Google has a problem in China. It may be headed for a bigger one in Europe.

So far, no one has accused European governments of cyberattacks like those that Google says it has suffered in China. But on issues from privacy to copyright protection to the dominance of Google’s Internet search engine, clashes with European lawmakers, regulators and consumer advocates are escalating.

Europe matters to Google and its shareholders — potentially more than China. For nowhere else in the world is the company as powerful and as potentially vulnerable. Across most of Europe, Google is by far the biggest search engine, with a substantially bigger market share than in the United States. In a single European country, Britain, Google has roughly 10 times its estimated sales in China.

On a region where the media sector is mostly fragmented along national lines and sometimes dependent on public subsidies, Google’s border-straddling scale, its ambitious pursuit of profit and its embrace of an open, anything-goes Web are raising alarms. [ Read more ... ]

Irish blogger agrees €100,000 settlement for libel: Via IT Law in Ireland.

The Sunday Times has details of the settlement which was obliquely mentioned in Forbes last week:

A blogger has agreed a €100,000 settlement after libelling Niall Ó Donnchú, a senior civil servant, and his girlfriend Laura Barnes. It is the first time in Ireland that defamatory material on a blog has resulted in a pay-out.

Barnes, an American book dealer, made a profit of up to €800,000 in 2005 from selling a cache of James Joyce papers to the state. One year later she began a relationship with Ó Donnchú, an assistant secretary in the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism.

In December 1, 2006, a blogger who styles himself as Ardmayle posted a comment about the couple and the sale of the Joycean manuscripts under the headline “Barnes and Noble”. Following a legal complaint, he took down the blog and in February 2007 he posted an apology which had been supplied by Ó Donnchú’s and Barnes’ lawyer, Ivor Fitzpatrick solicitors. [ Read more ... ]

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Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

An offhand comment the other day by a friend caught my attention—"Did you know that you can't watch the Super Bowl on a TV screen larger than 55 inches? Yeah, it's right there in the law."

With the Colts and Saints set to do battle in Super Bowl XLIV, this seemed worth looking into as a public service. Could it be that some of those giant flat panel TV sets now finding their way into US living rooms are actually violating copyright law?

Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)

Salon Radio: ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

In October, 2008, the ACLU issued a report outlining the policies needed to restore civil liberties and America's constitutional framework in the wake of the Bush assault, entitled "Actions for Restoring America."  On the one-year anniversary of Obama's inauguration as President, the ACLU has issued a new report -- pointedly and revealingly entitled "America Unrestored" -- which details Obama's record in these areas.  Although there have been a few isolated bright spots (the DOJ's intensified domestic enforcement of civil rights laws), Obama's overall civil liberties record has been extremely disappointing, and this report from the ACLU (with which I consult) comprehensively documents the failures. [ Read more ... ]

Why IP addresses are no longer enough to identify internet users: Via IT Law in Ireland.

Richard Clayton has an excellent post explaining (in terms even a lawyer can understand) why the traditional formula of IP address plus timestamp is increasingly inadequate as a way of identifying internet users: [ Read more ... ]

Web Censor Seeks $2.2 Billion for China Hack: Via Threat Level.

A California web-filtering company says it is the victim of “one of the largest cases of software piracy in history.”

Lawyers for adult- and violent-content web-filtering company CYBERsitter claim in a federal lawsuit that the Chinese government purloined some 3,000 lines of its code from its servers as part of software for a national censorship project –- in which several international computer makers are accused of knowingly distributing throughout China.

“They are heavy allegations. Three thousand lines of code, approximately, were stolen. It was a serious thing that was done,” Elliot Gipson, a lawyer for Santa Barbara-based CYBERsitter, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Gipson said about 56 million copies of China’s government censorship software, part of the so-called Green Dam project, were marketed with his client’s code in China last year.

The complaint, which seeks $2.2 billion in damages, (.pdf)  names Sony, Lenovo Group, Toshiba, ACER and, among others, ASUSTeK. [ Read more ... ]

Report: U.S. Fears Public Scrutiny Would Scuttle IP Treaty Talks — Update: Via Threat Level.

The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been shrouded in secrecy, and the Bush and the Obama administrations have declared it unsuitable for public debate because divulging its contents could harm America’s “national security.”

A few recent leaks have showed that the unfinished agreement, which is being negotiated largely between the European Union and the United States, is likely to benefit the content industry. At the same time, it might pave the way for international guidelines that could lead to consumers losing their internet accounts if they are believed to be digital copyright scofflaws.

But we now know that the real reason for secrecy, the one suspected all along, was that the United States does not think it could reach an accord with Europe and the nearly dozen other nations if the proposal came under public scrutiny. [ Read more ... ]