General Keith Alexander Is An Opportunistic Coward

from the shielded-in-shame dept

In all that we've written about General Keith Alexander, former chief guy at the NSA who has overseen the most egregious overreach in domestic spying American history, we've learned a great deal about him. For instance, we know logic eludes him, after he insisted that we need more spying because current spying is encouraging terrorism. We also know he doesn't give a damn about the whole freedom of the press thing, what with his support for press gag orders. And we know he's a man of limited imagination, having told Congress he just can't think of any other way to keep you and I safe without the NSA's massive surveillance programs.

You know what else Keith Alexander is? A coward. I say that absolutely knowing that I'll probably get killed in the comments for suggesting a man who signed up to serve the public, serve in the military, and serve in intelligence is a coward. Well to hell with anyone who suggests you can't call a man who serves a coward. Where were all of you when Edward Snowden was getting lambasted in the exact same way? Still, accusing a man like Alexander of cowardice requires an explanation. Get yourself started by watching this clip of his appearance on CNN.

"It's going to get more dangerous. I would rather be sitting here in the hot seat defending what we're doing than sitting here in the hot seat after a terrorist attack and you asking me 'how did we fail the country?' It's a bad place out there. They're trying to kill us. These are some of the tools. If you take away some of the tools, it is my assessment after forty years in the business, and today is my fortieth anniversary in joining the army, it is my assessment that it is going to get tougher. And these leaks have hurt us. They will get tougher."

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way. All this harm that has supposedly been done by Snowden's leaks turns out to be smoke and mirrors, as far as what the government is willing to prove is concerned. Now that that's out of the way, perhaps unlike some of my colleagues here, I too believe there is a very real danger from international terrorism. That said, a blanket statement about how bad things are and how "they" are trying to kill us is about as useful as a rectum on a houseplant. Nobody is arguing that there isn't at least some degree of danger, the argument is over how far we're willing to let our government go to protect the liberty at which they're chipping away, nevermind the way we comport ourselves as a member of the international community.

But it's the first part of that statement that really pisses me off and it's that same part that reveals the cowardice inside Alexander. This constant hint-dropping of how much more difficult it is to prevent the next domestic terrorist attack now that the public is aware of the massive surveillance program is a pretty clear attempt at innoculation of responsibility. It's as if these spy chiefs looked at the damning of public officials that occurred after 9/11 (far too little of it, in my opinion) and decided to shield themselves from possible future criticism by proactively blaming Snowden's leaks for forthcoming attacks. Read another way, his hot seat comment reads to say: if sometime in the future, thousands of Americans end up dead in an attack, don't come blame us, you took our tools away from us.

For me, it's hard to imagine a more cowardly statement. Is Alexander so afraid to face potential failure that he would scapegoat someone who, at the very least, thought he was doing his patriotic duty? Would he have the intelligence community sidestep their responsibility simply because the public now recognizes the NSA's overreach? Would he cast off his duty simply because sunlight has finally marked his underground lair?

That kind of chess-piece positioning isn't the act of a patriot. It isn't the act of a hero. It's the act of a coward, which is exactly what General Keith Alexander is, and I'm happy to treat him like one. After all, the brave thing to do is to understand that freedom comes with danger and to bear that danger gratefully and willingly.

Filed Under: danger, fear, fud, keith alexander, threats

Verizon Sends Netflix A Cease & Desist, Saying It Can't Blame Verizon For Clogged Networks

from the really,-now? dept

So, yesterday, some of the tech blogosphere blew up over the fact that Netflix had started blaming Verizon for network congestion: Netflix claimed it had actually been testing this for a few weeks now, and others have seen it on AT&T networks as well. Verizon was, to put it mildly, not happy about all of this. It quickly told reporters that the whole thing was a "PR stunt" and pushed out an angry blog post, saying that it was all Netflix's fault for the way it routed traffic to Verizon's network. Notably, just about a month ago, Netflix had agreed to an interconnection deal, similar to the one that Netflix famously did with Comcast, but it's possible that the new ports aren't fully operational yet.

Either way, I was going to ignore this latest round of little stupid spats that have been going back and forth -- except that now it appears that Verizon has taken it up a level and actually issued a cease and desist to Netflix sayng it should no longer blame Verizon when the network is clogged. I'm not sure what actual legal basis Verizon thinks it has to do this, and wonder if Netflix will just cave in and stop with the messages. But, it certainly would create quite the interesting lawsuit if Verizon decided to go to court about this. Update: Netflix has indicated that it won't stop.

Either way, it's pretty clear that even once Netflix has signed an interconnection agreement with them, these ISP's are still not at all happy about the situation.

Update: Added an embed of the actual letter below.

Filed Under: arguments, broadband, cease and desist, interconnection, net neutrality, streaming, threats
Companies: comcast, netflix, verizon

How Many Terrorists Are There: Not As Many As You Might Think

from the and-even-if-we-count-generously dept

Terrorism is a deadly, ever-present menace from which Americans should spare no expense or effort in protecting themselves. Or so our rulers claim.

For example, Rep. Mike Rogers warns, "The threat from Al Qaeda-linked terrorists is continuously evolving as they seek new safe havens from which to recruit, train and conduct operations against Americans and our interests.... terrorists tell us they want to strike American and other Western targets." And John Pistole at the TSA excuses his agency's sexual assaults of passengers by incoherently intoning, "The reason we are doing these types of pat downs and using the advanced imagery technology is trying to take the latest intelligence and how we know al Qaeda and affiliates want to hurt us, they want to bring down whether it is passenger air craft or cargo aircraft."

It would seem that terrorism runs rampant, as the Feds remind us with each new infringement of our freedom. Which means there must be millions of terrorists out there, right?

Nope. The same government that spends trillions of our dollars and sacrifices our few remaining rights fighting terrorists also publishes a census of sorts on them – though apparently the Feds don't read it. Country Reports on Terrorism appears annually courtesy of the US Department of State. And each year, it explodes the myth that jihadists lurk on every airport's concourse. In fact, bureaucrats at just one of the agencies supposedly battling them, the Department of Homeland Security, far outnumber them.

Naturally, the enemy is too busy plotting America's destruction to fill out questionnaires, so the Reports relies on educated guesses: statements such as "membership is estimated in the low hundreds" and "core membership is believed to be fewer than 100" abound. And of the 51 "Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) ... designated by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)" that the Reports surveys, the "Strength" of 15 remains flatly "unknown."

Nonetheless, adding these figures together should yield a rough idea of how many foes scheme to blow us sky-high.

While crunching numbers, we'll give the Feds something they never give us: the benefit of the doubt. We'll take the higher figure each time we encounter a range ("Reports of Jundallah membership vary from 500 to 2,000" counts as 2000, for instance). And we'll interpret "several," "few" or "low" as 5, so that "several thousand" or "membership in the low thousands" becomes 5000. Finally, we'll double our tally to cover those 15 "unknowns" and their no doubt huge enrollments.

So how many participants in "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" worldwide menace America's "national security?" How many threaten us so badly that our rulers insist on suspending much of the Bill of Rights to counteract the danger?

Try 184,000.

Yep, just 184,000. Even big, bad "Al-Qa'ida (AQ)" and its three affiliates ("Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula"; "Al-Qa'ida in Iraq"; and "Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb") boast only 4000 bad guys combined. (The main Al-Qa'ida's "strength" is "impossible to estimate," but the Reports admits that its "core has been seriously degraded" following "the death or arrest of dozens of mid- and senior-level AQ operatives." "Dozens," not "hundreds." Hmmm.)

And remember, 184,000 is a ridiculously inflated figure – both because of our generous accounting and also because governments often expand a word's meaning well beyond the dictionary's. You may recall the Feds' contending with straight faces in 2004 that if "a little old lady in Switzerland gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda," she met the definition of "enemy combatant." Five years later, a federal Fusion Center decreed that "if you're an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or [Ron Paul], if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group." No telling how many confused Swiss grandmothers and readers of Techdirt's subversive articles cluster among those 184,000.

That number grows even more absurd when we compare it with the aforementioned Homeland Security's 240,000 Warriors on Terror. Meanwhile, something like 780,000 cops stalk us nationwide, whose duties also encompass tilting at terrorism's windmill. And that's to say nothing of the scores of other bureaucracies at the national, state, and local levels hunting these same 184,000 guerrillas as well as an additional 1,368,137 troops from the armed forces [click on "Rank/Grade - current month"].

Nor do American armies, bureaucratic or literal, battle alone. Britain, Europe and assorted allies aim at that grotesquely outnumbered 184,000, too.

It gets worse. Country Reports also lists "Location/Area of Operation" for our 51 groups. Surprisingly, most of them harbor extremely modest ambitions, especially for folks who hate our freedom (or what's left of it): they're far more interested in their own backyards than ours. For example, the Abu Sayyaf Group "operates primarily in the provinces of the Sulu Archipelago, namely Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. The group also operates on the Zamboanga Peninsula." And though American politicians suspect it of hoping to overthrow the Great Satan, it instead "claims to promote an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago."

Ditto for the Continuity Irish Republican Army ("Location/Area of Operation: Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic"); the Haqqani Network ("...active along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and across much of southeastern Afghanistan"); Lashkar i Jhangvi ("...active primarily in Punjab, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Karachi, and Baluchistan"); and even the National Liberation Army ("Mostly in the rural and mountainous areas of northern, northeastern, and southwestern Colombia, as well as the border regions with Venezuela"). In fact, despite the State Department's insistence that "the organization's terrorist activity or terrorism must threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests) of the United States" for inclusion in the Reports, it's incredibly difficult to see how most of these associations pose any peril whatever to the US.

It's even harder – some would say impossible – to understand how protecting ourselves from these distant dissidents requires forfeiting even one of our rights, let alone the wholesale evisceration of freedom the Security State demands.

Becky Akers is a free-lance writer and historian who has published two novels, Halestorm and Abducting Arnold. Both are set during the American Revolution, when terrorists overthrew the world's most powerful empire.

Filed Under: al qaeda, terrorists, threats

Health And Human Services Apparently Unable To Recognize Satire; Sends Bogus Legal Threat

from the because-shut-up dept

Another day, another story of someone with skin way too thin not comprehending satire and dashing off an angry legal threat. In this case, it's worse than usual because the bogus legal threat is coming from the US government. Popehat has the full story of how some of the legal geniuses at the Department of Health and Human Services have sent a bogus cease-and-desist letter over a pair of obviously satirical posts on the site AddictionMyth.com. While we've long been skeptical of the medical profession's desire to label all sorts of things "addictions," that particular site takes it to extreme levels, arguing that there's nothing that's addictive, and all talk of addictions (including drug and alcohol addictions) are just a big scam "perpetrated by law enforcement, rehab groups and the entertainment industry." I think that's nuts, but they certainly have their right to say so.

They also have the right to post a satirical conversation with a so-called "addiction guru." As Ken at Popehat points out, there's no way to read this without realizing it's satire:

AM: According to your research, blackouts occur not just in middle age alcoholics, but in young college students who may not have built up much tolerance for alcohol. Their drinking often ended up in unprotected sex, vandalism, and fights, of which they had no memory until cued by a friend. What was their response to their memory? Regret? Horror? Delight? Glee? A little of each?

AW: I wasn’t the author of the research. But I would say a little of each, at least based on my own experience. I suspect they remembered more than they wanted to admit. Though one time I got really drunk at a party and my friend told me that I was talking to his sister in French, and I had absolutely no recollection of that. It was surprising to me as a brain scientist because alcohol has been shown to suppress activation of the inferior frontal region (Broca’s area also known as the ‘language center’). I probably shouldn’t have been able to talk at all, let alone French, given my BAC. But what was really weird was that I don’t even know French!

Following this, AddictionMyth posted a bogus mocking satirical cease-and-desist, which pretends to be angry about the satirical interview. This too, is obvious satire. I mean, the letter includes this line:

Do you realize how psychotically insane that sounds? In my field we have a term for it: CRAY-CRAY!

Either way, this bogus cease-and-desist appears to have stirred up the attention of a lawyer at the real US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which apparently has some extra time on its hands now that Healthcare.gov's website is kinda, sorta working. Lawyer Dale Berkley sent a cease-and-desist in which he argues both that (1) the interview is clearly not true and (2) that it might be defamatory. You can't really have both of those things be true.

We recently became aware of two items that you posted on your website directed to two employees of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (“NIAAA”)--one which purports to be an interview with NIAAA Project Manager Dr. Aaron White, and the other a letter from NIAAA Director Dr. George Koob.

Of course Dr. White did not in fact participate in the interview and Dr. Koob did not write the letter attributed to him.

We are concerned that, especially with respect to the mock interview, the public could be deceived and misled into believing that Dr. White in fact contributed to the interview. Those items are defamatory, and expose you to potential liability.

We therefore request that you either remove the articles from your website, or provide a prominent disclaimer indicating that Dr. White and Dr. Koob did not participate in the interview or write the letter.

As noted above, by admitting it's obviously fake, Berkley undermines his own legal argument. Ken White summarizes it nicely:

When the target of satire complains that it is defamatory, the relevant question is whether the satire can reasonably be taken as a statement of fact about its subject. Dr. Berkley, by saying that "of course" the satirical articles do not reflect the actual words of the subjects, has just proclaimed that the satire he is complaining about cannot be taken as a statement of fact.

You paid taxes for that.

White goes into a more in-depth legal analysis of just how preposterously bogus the letter from HHS is, and questions if Berkley was even remotely aware of the law before sending the letter, or if any other lawyer at HHS bothered to look it over. In the meantime, we're wondering if HHS has any programs for helping with the tragically satire-impaired?

Filed Under: addiction, cease and desist, defamation, free speech, health and human services, hhs, satire, threats

WIPO Boss Reappointed Until 2020, Despite Bogus Legal Threat Against Blogger

from the wipo-credibility-gone dept

WIPO boss Francis Gurry's leadership has been full of some really questionable controversies, including potentially violating UN sanctions by sending computers to North Korea and Iran, as well as having people break into the offices of some of his own employees to secretly collect DNA samples. Still, to me, perhaps most troubling was his attempt last month to stifle public debate and commentary about the DNA controversy by sending an intimidating letter to blogger Gene Quinn, threatening him with the possibility of criminal prosecution in Switzerland, for merely publishing a "report of misconduct" filed about Gurry by one of his deputies, James Pooley.

Given all the controversy -- some of it quite serious -- it seems reasonable to question if Gurry is the right person to continue to lead WIPO. Apparently, the member states that control WIPO don't have a problem with it, because they've now reappointed Gurry, giving him a second six-year term.

As for his focus? It appears to be to continue pushing a maximalist position. While it should be noted that WIPO has actually become marginally less maximalist in the past few years, thanks to the influence of developing nations like India and Brazil, it's still an organization that focuses on maximizing intellectual property, rather than maximizing what's actually best for the public. That's clear from Gurry's "acceptance" speech.

Turning to the future, I believe that the fundamental challenge that we face as an Organization is to achieve a shared understanding of the contribution and value of intellectual property to economic, social and cultural development.

Notice that it's not about determining whether or not it's actually true that "intellectual property" creates such value -- it's just assumed as fact.

And, indeed, he also highlighted areas where WIPO has been working on dangerous new forms of "intellectual property" protections -- where absolutely none is needed: broadcast rights and traditional knowledge.

In concrete terms, for example, the Organization must achieve successful outcomes both on broadcasting and on traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions and genetic resources. If we are unable to address the latest technological developments, the Organization will fail in its main mission of encouraging innovation and will become irrelevant to the mainstream of global innovation. If we are unable to address traditional knowledge systems, the Organization will fail in its mission of universality and will not recognize the full scope of intellectual contributions to innovation.

This is ridiculous and dangerous. Locking up traditional knowledge doesn't help "recognize the full scope of intellectual contributions to innovation" -- it just makes it more difficult for continued innovation. Protectionism where none has been needed slows down progress, rather than advances it.

As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The problem here is that WIPO seems to view every bit of knowledge, content and transmission as a rogue form of "property" that needs to be locked up and put behind a tollbooth. And rather than looking into how dangerous an assumption that is, Gurry is busy threatening bloggers for reporting about his own questionable behavior.

Filed Under: dna, francis gurry, gene quinn, intimidation, threats, un, wipo

Medialink Threatens Customer With Lawsuit For Writing A Negative Amazon Review

from the how-not-to-win-fans dept

It's an age-old story. Guy buys a router. Router sucks. Guy writes negative 1-star review on Amazon. Company threatens to sue him for defamation. Because it's not like every other attempt to sue over negative reviews ends badly.

It is true that Reddit user trevely's original review did make some strong claims, which clearly, the router maker, Medialink, objected to. Trevely has since edited his review to clarify which parts were opinion and which were clear facts. Medialink's main complaints were that the original review claimed that many of the positive reviews of their router were fake, and that the router was just a rebranded version of someone else's router. Still, the original review was no worse than many standard negative reviews, and given how many other reviews Medialink had, you'd think that Medialink would just let this go, rather than call in the lawyers -- and suddenly get so much more attention to the negative review. Oh, and more attention to the positive reviews... and their legitimacy.

Whether or not they are actually fake, some Reddit users have certainly spotted some fairly questionable 5-star reviews, like the one guy who seems to think that the router is actually a set of car headlight bulbs. And, others have long suspected fake reviews on the product, so it's not like trevely just made this up out of nowhere.

As for the rebranding claim, well, as the original review noted, that seems to be confirmed by a filing with the FCC, in which Medialink directly says that the equipment is "electrically identical" to the Tenda router that trevely was pointing to. Oops.

Meanwhile, Amazon's seller rules are pretty strict about not letting its merchants try to influence user reviews -- either pushing for positive reviews or threatening over negative ones. Given, as treverly noted in his own initial review, that Medialink seems to exist almost entirely based on Amazon, breaking Amazon's rules by threatening a negative review (with a questionable lawsuit, no less) may wipe out the channel the company relies on. Either way, what Amazon does might not matter, because now the Reddit crowd has jumped in, and Medialink/Mediabridge's name may be even more associated with bogus legal bullying than crappy routers -- though I can't see how either one helps the company very much.

Filed Under: defamation, lawsuits, medialink, reviews, routers, threats
Companies: amazon, mediabridge

Shameful: WIPO Threatens Blogger With Criminal Charges For Accurately Reporting On WIPO Director's Alleged Misconduct

from the intellectual-property-and-censorship-again dept

Last fall we wrote about some surprising allegations that Francis Gurry, the director of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization -- a part of the UN), had surreptitiously taken DNA samples from employees while trying to determine who had sent him anonymous letters. This is the same Gurry who was already involved in highly questionable scandals involving ignoring UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran, to send them computers, which WIPO idiotically believed those countries would use to bolster their local patent systems. Because, when you think of Iran and North Korea, I'm sure you think about their patent systems.

There had been some public efforts by a few members of Congress to oppose Gurry's re-election to WIPO because of these infractions, but all that seemed for naught a couple months ago when Gurry was re-nominated. It's not final that he'll remain as director, but it's almost entirely assured. A few weeks ago, however, I saw that stories of the DNA collection had resurfaced, mainly in a blog post by noted patent lawyer and blogger Gene Quinn. While Quinn and I disagree about nearly everything patent related -- sometimes angrily -- his blog is still a worthwhile read, and this original story had caught my attention. Quinn had a copy of the "Report of Misconduct" filed by James Pooley, one of Gurry's deputies, going into much more detail on Gurry's actions with regards to the illegal DNA collection, and calling into serious question Gurry's ability to lead WIPO. You can read much more about Pooley's charges in a Fox News report. However, you can no longer read the report or Quinn's analysis of it because WIPO threatened Quinn with criminal charges for posting it.

I had actually opened Quinn's post -- and the files he posted -- back when he first put them up, but set them aside to revisit later, and like many stories I hope to get to, I never actually wrote about them. While I still had the tabs with the files opened, somewhere between then and when I restarted my browser, the files had actually gone away. The threat to Quinn, however, seems worse than the claims of DNA collection in the first place. Here is WIPO actively issuing bogus legal threats to censor someone performing journalistic endeavors reporting on factual information. Here's the letter that WIPO's lawyer sent Quinn:

I am writing to you in my capacity as Legal Counsel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in relation to a report and its accompanying exhibits (“WIPO Deputy Director General Alleges Gurry Misconduct”) that are posted on your website IP Watchdog.

I should like to express my grave concern over the contents of this report, which is both insulting and defamatory, as it contains false statements that harm WIPO and the reputation of WIPO’s Director General, Mr. Francis Gurry.

As at Friday, April 11, 2014, we have noticed that the Report itself has been removed from the website. We are, however, very concerned to see that the annexes to the Report (the so-called “exhibits”) are still posted on your website. As you will no doubt know, the said Report and its exhibits or annexes constitute defamatory material which, inter alia, suggest corruption, concern DNA allegations, and are a republication of rehashed allegations.

In addition, I should like to remind you that under Swiss law, the publication of such false and defamatory material could constitute a criminal offence. This is, of course, without prejudice to the laws of any jurisdiction to which you may be subject.

We hereby request that you immediately remove the Report and all its exhibits or annexes from the website.

We hereby further request that you publish an apology to the Director General of WIPO for the publication of false and defamatory material on the website.

Please be informed that if this request is not immediately acceded to, the Director General and WIPO will seek independent legal advise to bring defamation proceedings against you in any competent jurisdiction.

We thank you for your anticipated cooperation.

Sincerely,

Edward Kwakwa
Legal Counsel / World Intellectual Property Organization

This would be from the same Kwakwa who was also at the center of the computers-to-North Korea and Iran stories. Either way, the threats are ridiculous. First off, under the SPEECH Act, Quinn is completely protected from any defamation ruling for a variety of reasons. First, not only is it unclear if this was actually defamatory, merely republishing a report written by someone else is protected in the US under Section 230 of the CDA, and the SPEECH Act was written to make sure that Section 230 protections applied even against lawsuits filed in other countries for publications based in the US.

Second, it's quite incredible for Kwakwa to declare -- as fact -- that the content is defamatory (even suggesting that Quinn magically "knows" this is defamatory). Clearly Pooley and many others do not believe it is defamatory, and as far as I can tell, no court has ruled that the content is defamatory. And this isn't just some random person declaring that Gurry was involved in this: it's a guy who reports directly to Gurry. If it's defamatory, let Gurry take it to court and have it declared so. You don't just get to censor stuff based on one party's claim.

Third, as Intellectual Asset Magazine (linked above) notes, the whole thing -- intimidating a journalist with threats of criminal charges for merely reporting on a document that no one denied was, in fact, filed by WIPO deputy director James Pooley -- is insane:

As a journalist I find this utterly outrageous. I hope that other people do too. Quinn was not threatened with legal action for any allegations that he made, or for the slant on the story that he wrote around Pooley’s report and exhibits. Instead, he was threatened with legal action for providing a link to them.

Let’s remember, Pooley is Deputy Director of WIPO, he works with and reports to Gurry, and he has made very serious allegations. If that is not newsworthy, I do not know what is. Furthermore, as far as I know, these allegations have not been withdrawn – and certainly had not been when Kwakwa wrote the letter - neither has any investigation of them been reported, let alone concluded. Yet Kwakwa, WIPO’s legal counsel, has declared them “false and defamatory”. How does he know?

Quinn has chosen not to fight this, taking down his post and the associated documents, noting that while he believes in the First Amendment, he's currently recovering from hip replacement surgery and is in no condition to take on this sort of fight at the moment. I've seen at least two other reporters and bloggers who claim to have a copy of the report similarly refuse to post it, noting that it's not worth the legal fight.

And thus WIPO has effectively censored a report on misconduct by its Director General, filed by a senior deputy. To me that's just as, if not more, incriminating than the original charges of the DNA collection. The fact that WIPO believes this is appropriate screams of a coverup from an organization that has something to hide. Perhaps it's no surprise -- given how often we've seen copyright used for censorship -- to find out that the organization that pushes for greater copyright and patent maximalism around the world is also a fan of direct intimidation and censorship of journalists.

However, it should certainly call into serious question how WIPO functions, and whether Director Gurry is the sort of person who should be leading the organization when it appears to be doing all this under his watch.

Filed Under: defamation, edward kwakwa, francis gurry, free speech, gene quinn, intimidation, james pooley, journalism, speech act, threats, wipo

Michael Hayden Thinks Snowden Revelations, Rather Than NSA Actions, May Splinter The Internet

from the yeah,-perhaps-you-shouldn't-have-done-the-spying-in-the-first-place dept

Former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden seems to be doing what Michael Hayden does best: spewing ridiculous fear-mongering statements in support of the intelligence community that assumes that anyone hearing/reading the quotes has a brain the size of a newt and is unable to put two and two together. The latest comes from an an interview he did with Der Spiegel, which kicks off with a bang, in which he talks up how the internet is all about freedom and love and how Snowden may have destroyed all that:

SPIEGEL: General Hayden, let's speak about the future of the Internet. Are you concerned?

Hayden: I am very concerned. This may be the single greatest, most destructive effect from the last 10 months of what Mr. Snowden has revealed. The Internet was begun in the United States and it is based on American technology, but it's a global activity. We in the United States feel it reflects free people, free ideas and free trade. There are countries that do not want the Internet as we know it. Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia. The Snowden revelations will now allow them to argue that we Americans want to keep a single, unitary Internet, because it just helps us spy. My fear is that the disclosures may have set a motion in progress that ends up really threatening the Internet as we know it.

Of course, that is the purest form of "blaming the messenger" as you might find. The whole line about how the internet "reflects free people, free ideas and free trade" would be a lot stronger of a point if the NSA hadn't undermined basically all of that with its spying activity. The problem isn't that Snowden revealed all that. It's that the NSA was doing everything it was doing in the first place. If doing these things undermine the idea that the internet is about "free people, free ideas and free trade," perhaps it shouldn't have been doing them. To blame Snowden for that seems... ridiculous.

SPIEGEL: It is not only the Russians and Chinese who use this argument, but also Americans like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He recently described the US government as a threat to the Internet.

Hayden: The more people like him say that, the more it indirectly strengthens these other arguments. The Russians and the Chinese aren't saying this to protect themselves against alleged American espionage. They are saying this because they don't like the Internet's freedom of speech. Their goal is to divide the Internet up into national domains and create barriers in cyberspace. That's the last thing Zuckerberg would want to have happen.

Hayden is pretending that it's the Russians and the Chinese who kicked this off and made such statements. It is not. It was American technologists and entrepreneurs who recognize that when the NSA undermines their own products and purposely weakens key encryption standards that, yes, the NSA itself is a threat. Sure, the Russians and the Chinese have their own motives for slamming the US, but that's just Hayden trying to misdirect attention. The idea that Americans shouldn't accurately state that the NSA is a threat to the internet is bullshit. For someone who -- just seconds earlier -- was talking about our "freedoms" to then try to stifle Americans speaking out against the NSA by arguing that to do so "helps the enemy" is a level of depressing irony that only someone as tone deaf as Hayden can pull off.

SPIEGEL: On the one hand, the United States promotes the Internet as a tool of freedom. On the other hand, it now appears to many people to be a tool of surveillance.

Hayden: I am quite willing to have a discussion about what my country has or has not done, but it has to be based on facts. Let me first point out that the NSA doesn't monitor what every American is doing on the Internet. The NSA doesn't check who goes to what websites. But you've got these beliefs out there now.

Ha! Right after telling Zuckerberg and other good Americans to shut the hell up or it's helping our the Chinese and the Russians, he now says that he's willing to have a discussion about what the US has done? Really? Then there's the nice strawman, in which he pretends that what people are upset about is spying on what websites Americans visit (ignoring that he's talking to a German publication). He conveniently says nothing about tracking what non-Americans visit, nor the fact that it's not the website tracking that has people concerned, but rather hacking into various websites, tracking all kinds of confidential information.

SPIEGEL: It has been almost a year since Snowden left Hawaii. What has he changed?

Hayden: There are three or four effects. We do this, like other countries, for legitimate reasons, and it's harder to do this now with what has been made public, legitimate intelligence targets. It has become harder for American services to cooperate with friendly services with common goals. What foreign service would want to cooperate with us, given our absolute seeming inability to keep anything secret? And then it really harmed American industry, and that's why you have the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and the Eric Schmidts of the world expressing great outrage. They aren't doing anything for the American government that other companies do not do for their host governments when they receive a lawful request, but they've been singled out, and they have been unfairly harmed by this. And finally, it has poisoned relationships between people who really are friends.

More bogus misdirection from Hayden. Schmidt and Zuckerberg are not upset about the situations in which they complied with lawful requests. They're upset about hacking into datacenters without permission. They're upset about doing "QUANTUM" inserts via bogus Facebook attacks. They're upset about weakening basic encryption. None of that has to do with lawful requests.

And, where they are upset about lawful requests, it's because of the NSA's bogus secrecy in which it refuses to let these tech companies show how many users are impacted. Once again, the problem there is the over-secrecy on the part of the NSA.

Finally, the idea that others are upset with the US because it "can't keep stuff secret" is equally bogus. No one has complained about that one bit. The Snowden leaks happened. No one seems to think that makes the next leak any more or less likely. Hayden is just, once again, trying to pin the blame of the NSA's own overreach back on Snowden.

SPIEGEL: The Germans are more sensitive when it comes to the issue of surveillance.

Hayden: I confess that we Americans underappreciated the impact of that not just on the chancellor but on the German population, and I mean this sincerely. Perhaps we underestimated the depth of feelings that the German people -- and again, not just the chancellor, but the German people, felt about this question of privacy, given their historical circumstances compared to our historical circumstances. At the Munich Security Conference it was clear to me that Germans regard privacy the way we Americans might regard freedom of speech or religion. Perhaps we did not appreciate that enough.

In which Hayden more or less admits that he thinks the First Amendment is important, but the Fourth? Not so much.

SPIEGEL: Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA is conducting similar operations against China. They monitor the head of state of China. They monitored a couple of universities. NSA is breaking into some Chinese companies. Isn't it hypocritical to complain and yet do similar things?

Hayden: It's only hypocritical if you had a peculiar and inaccurate way of looking at it at the beginning, and I have been quite public. I'd say, "Look, we spy. We're really good at it." There are two differences between us and the Chinese. We're actually more sophisticated, and we're self-limited. We don't do industrial espionage. I never claimed the moral high ground, you seem to be suggesting that we didn't spy. Let me play a joke on myself. I say, you know, if I had to talk to the Chinese about it, I'd go to Beijing, and I'd sit across the table, which I have done, and I would begin the conversation, "Look, you spy, we spy, but you steal the wrong stuff."

Note that he never explains why "industrial espionage" is so bad, while plain old espionage is fine. And, the evidence from the Huawei effort certainly suggested that the US was, in effect, doing industrial espionage anyway.

SPIEGEL: Give us a prediction about Snowden's future.

Hayden: I don't know. I think he asked for an extension of his visa. I think they will just kind of toss the ball up and keep juggling it for another year to see what happens.

SPIEGEL: Wouldn't it be better to bring him home...

Hayden: ... absolutely ...

SPIEGEL: ... and grant him clemency?

Hayden: No. God, no. No. No. This is the single greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of this country. It is incredibly damaging, and if we give him some sort of clemency or amnesty, all we're doing is teaching the next Edward Snowden that if you do this, make sure you steal a whole bunch of stuff.Edward Snowden has given this data to all these other folks. Glenn Greenwald has got it. Laura Poitras has got it. Bart Gellman has got it. DER SPIEGEL apparently has it. I mean, this stuff is coming out beyond the control of Edward Snowden.

Hayden still doesn't get it (or is purposely misleading). No one thinks Snowden should get clemency because he took "a whole bunch of stuff," but because he helped reveal a ton of very questionable activities by the US government, much of which may be unconstitutional and illegal. And that's the kind of thing that we should be encouraging, because as government employees, people take an oath to uphold the Constitution. That means when they see the government doing unconstitutional things, they should blow the whistle.

Michael Hayden may not like that -- especially as some of the revelations appear to implicate him and the decisions he made personally. But his answers here are flat out ridiculous, and they don't make Hayden look good. They make him look petty and vindictive, attacking a whistleblower who has exposed a bunch of things that Hayden helped set in motion. There's a lot more in the interview (including a lot of talk about spying on Germans), but these snippets here give you a sense of how Hayden approached this particular interview.

Filed Under: cia, ed snowden, internet, michael hayden, nsa, surveillance, threats

Baybrook Remodelers, Still In The Midst Of Suing People For Negative Reviews, Deploys A Disastrous SEO Hitman

from the hand-me-that-optimized-shovel,-will-ya? dept

Baybrook Remodelers, whose litigious efforts to silence a critic we covered last month, has apparently hired an SEO guy (or rather, Todd Ramos - SEO Guy) to help clean up its internet presence. Part of this cleanup effort involves asking sites that covered this story (Techdirt and Boing Boing) to delete the posts in question because one technical detail is allegedly wrong.

On the original post, someone representing Baybrook left a comment claiming that it had nothing to do with Kristen Arisian's mother being forced to move out of her house after being denied a Certificate of Occupation (CO) by the city of Milford, CT.

Kristen Arisian has concocted a crazy story that accuses Baybrook Remodelers, Inc. of throwing her mother out of her home. Kristen is spreading this false story and other negative reviews throughout the internet. Baybrook completed all of the work at her mother’s house in July 2007. Baybrook was paid in full, and her mother was very happy with the outcome of the several contracts she signed with Baybrook Remodelers. Kristen’s mother had her house lifted prior to Baybrook even being contacted for work. Presently, the City of Milford is refusing to issue a Certificate of Occupancy because the Arisians have never produced a certificate of elevation. A certificate of elevation is generated by the original engineer who completed the plans for the lifting of the house. The City of Milford will issue a CO once the certificate of elevation is issued. Baybrook Remodelers, Inc. is not an engineering firm, and had nothing to do with the lifting of the house. It is also my understanding that the City of Milford has not requested that Mrs. Arisian leave her home.

Todd Ramos contacted me via Twitter to press this point -- that the yanking of Arisian's CO kicked this whole thing off, not the other way around. But Kristen's comment in response notes that, contrary to Baybrook's claims, it may have had something to do with her mother being denied a CO. [embedded below]

If you look at the July letter from Kuchta, the permit number referenced is the permit pulled by Baybrook Remodelers. It was on this basis that she was thrown out.

Ramos sent me the following screenshot of the letter from the city stating this point. Of course, that sentence continues, pointing out another permit problem -- one that seems to be related to Baybrook's original work on the house. (Note: this is my own screenshot, because as soon as it became apparent I wouldn't delete the post, Todd Ramos deleted his DM conversation with me. I still had the conversation "active" on my phone, so I've posted the screenshots below. I've also transcribed it because my phone makes screenshots for ants.)


Even if we take Baybrook at its word that it had nothing to do with the CO being pulled, there's still the troublesome issue that what directly preceded this effort was an attempt to get the city to get Eileen Arisian to remove her less-than-complimentary signs, again using zoning ordinances. (Full story here.)

But a correction simply wasn't enough for Todd Ramos, who continued to claim that the entire post was false simply because of this single element, one that seems to be contradicted by the chain of events. As he put it, I was taking the word of a "crazy woman" rather than a trustworthy remodeling company currently engaged in lawsuits against two people who had posted negative reviews. He also threatened to post negative stories about "tech dirt" in response and claimed I wrote the original post out of "revenge and hate."

Meanwhile, here's what's been going on in Kristen's world, where she's still entangled in a lawsuit with Baybrook over negative reviews.

First off, she's going to be deposed pre-trial (trial date is currently set for March 5th, but Baybrook has been dragging this out since March of 2011, so even that may change). Certainly the deposition is expected, but the court has ordered it to be done at Baybrook's offices.

Kristen also noticed something else rather unusual. One day after posting its comment at Techdirt, three new glowing reviews of the company appeared at Yelp -- all posted on the same day, January 15th.


The bottom line, however, seems to be that Baybrook's web rep thinks the entire post should be deleted because it claims Arisian was motivated by the loss of her occupancy certificate. Ramos went on to make several statements about what he would do in response if the post didn't come down, as well as claim that he could convince Baybrook to drop the lawsuit against Kristen if the post was removed. Here are a few of the highlights (full conversation embedded below).

What is owner suppose to do I will have him end lawsuit if you guys can make these false statements go away

Well I will have to start having my team blog if it's not removed and it will be about tech dirt not getting facts before slandering people

Kind of crazy but it a OK like I said I have 600 bloggers and 20000 blog as ranging in pr 4 to 7 I can get things out as well

She hired yelp reviews and probably you guys and boing boing

Even if I was inclined to give Baybrook the benefit of a doubt on this one, there's too much out there that suggests the company isn't completely on the level. For one, its claim about the CO is misdirection. The story begins with its efforts (via baseless legal threats and zoning ordinances) to get the negative signs taken down. The city's decision to yank Arisian's CO may or may not have been urged on by Baybrook, but that's hardly the crux of the issue. Baybrook (through Ramos) claims the whole thing is motivated by the loss of the CO, but as the letter clearly states, the city was first notified about the signs (due to "several complaints") and decided to dig around for more violations after finding the signs to be a problem. (As the blog post detailing this points out, the alleged violations are from 2003/2004 and, according to Connecticut law, these violations have a 6-year statute of limitations. Milford found a way around this, however.)

Furthermore, Ramos' tactics are equally questionable. His claims of slander have no basis in reality, and his tactics suggest he hasn't had much practice approaching non-review websites with takedown requests. When it became apparent I wouldn't yank the entire post, Ramos shifted from friendly to threatening, claiming he would organize his army of bloggers to write negative things about Techdirt. Even worse, he tried to promise me things he couldn't possibly deliver, like dropping a lawsuit. He didn't help his case by continually referring to Kristen's mother as a "crazy woman" and failed to bring any evidence contradicting what I had posted, other than the same letter than Kristen had posted on her own website. If this was as damning as he made it out to be, there would be little reason for Baybrook's lawsuit target to post it on her own site. Furthermore, despite his continual reference to Boing Boing, our friends at Boing Boing tell us they haven't actually heard from anyone asking to have their post (that links to ours) taken down.

As it stands now, Baybrook may not have directly forced the city's hand on this issue, but that's only according to Baybrook's own statements. The chain of events seems to suggest otherwise. The company definitely appears to have been instrumental in motivating the city of Milford to dig deeper into zoning ordinances after its initial attempts to have the critical signs removed failed. (See the original post for the original, completely ridiculous legal threat.) But we can be more certain about one thing: putting Ramos in charge of cleaning up the company's reputation may not be working out quite as well as Baybrook Remodelers may have envisioned.

[Addedum: Todd Ramos sent over a letter (embedded below) from the city apparently issued after the completion of Baybrook's remodeling work (although there's no name on it other than Eileen Arisian's) that states the work is complete and a Certificate of Building Compliance has been issued. It also states that no Certificate of Zoning Compliance will be issued until an As-Built survey and height certification is completed. This would indicate the city had an issue with Arisian's house in 2008. This doesn't, however, explain why it failed to be an issue until after the signs critical of Baybrook were hung by Arisian. It also doesn't back up Ramos' claims that work was completed to Arisian's satisfaction.]

Filed Under: lawsuits, reviews, seo, threats, todd ramos
Companies: baybrook remodlers

Have You Been Threatened By Lodsys? Please Share Your Story

from the speak-up dept

One of the worst patent trolls out there has been Lodsys, a company that got a few crappy patents from Intellectual Ventures, which it claims covers some rather basic functionality found in lots and lots of mobile apps. It then started to threaten basically everyone if they used things like Apple's own in-app payment offerings, even though Apple (via a deal with Intellectual Ventures) already technically has a "license" to avoid infringing on the patents. It's been pretty clear that it's something of a shakedown business. Lodsys has sent out tons of threatening letters to lots and lots of app developers, but tends to run and hide when a company actually fights back. Lodsys is so petty that it appeared to choose one of its targets because an app developer called them a patent troll -- something that Lodsys' lawyer admitted. Oh, and apparently, Lodsys asks to be paid via a Swedish bank in an effort to avoid paying taxes. And, unfortunately, plenty of app developers do pay, because it's too expensive to fight back. Promising apps are stymied because of this.

And Lodsys just keeps on going. The folks over at the the Application Developers Alliance (disclaimer: in the past they've sponsored some stuff we've done) have been fighting back against Lodsys for quite some time, and have now set up a Lodsys Victim Survey, hoping to collect information and data about Lodsys' threats. Part of the reason that trolls like Lodsys get away with what they're doing is that they can effectively act in secret much of the time. Recipients of threat letters are often quite afraid to speak out, and that leaves them isolated, giving Lodsys much more power. Similarly, with many patent trolls, they seek to include gag orders on settlements (and some patent trolls have even tried to place gag orders on threat letters or early negotiations). Hopefully, collecting useful information and finding others who have been similarly targeted, it will be easier to fight back against egregious patent trolls like Lodsys. If you, or someone you know, has been threatened by Lodsys, please consider filling out the survey.

Filed Under: app developers, apps, in app payments, patent reform, patent trolls, patents, threats
Companies: lodsys