NZ Prime Minister Admits That The Government Illegally Wiretapped Megaupload Employees

from the yet-another-mishap dept

Since the January raid of Megaupload, not a month seems to go by in which another massive error in procedures isn't revealed concerning how US and New Zealand law enforcement handled the whole process. And each time, the mistakes seem to get bigger and bigger. They had the wrong warrants. They mishandled evidence. They mishandled the extradition request. And today comes the big news. New Zealand's Prime Minister, John Key, revealed that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the equivalent of the NSA in New Zealand, illegally intercepted communications regarding individuals in the Megaupload case and provided those details to law enforcement. Like the NSA, the GCSB is in charge of monitoring electric communications, but is not allowed to use those tools domestically, only on foreign communications. Key has now ordered an investigation.

Mr Key says the Crown has filed a memorandum in the High Court in the Megaupload case advising the Court and affected parties that the GCSB had acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.

After being informed about the matter by the Director of the GCSB on September 17, the Prime Minister referred the Bureau’s actions to the Inspector-General, Hon Paul Neazor. The Inspector-General is an independent statutory officer with the power to enquire into any matter related to a government intelligence agency’s compliance with the law.

Once again, like pretty much all of these "mishaps," this seems to suggest a rather cavalier attitude towards actually following proper procedures under the law to go after Dotcom and Megaupload. Throughout this whole process, it really does appear that law enforcement, under pressure from Hollywood, believed that Dotcom was such a criminal mastermind that they could skirt the law in all sorts of ways to try to shut him down. And each time these mishaps come to light, it just raises more and more questions about whether or not law enforcement really had any legitimate evidence or reasons to do what they did.

Filed Under: gcsb, john key, kim dotcom, new zealand, spying, surveillance, wiretapping
Companies: megaupload

Clearing The Air On Skype: Most Of What You Read Was Not Accurate, But There Are Still Reasons To Worry

from the let's-dig-in dept

Over the last few days there's been something of a firestorm of people claiming that Skype was letting police listen in on your calls. We had been among those who noted that Skype was, at the very least, no longer willing to make clear statements about whether the service was able to be wire-tapped. Skype to Skype calls are a direct person-to-person connection (rather than through a central server), so most people thought that they were not particularly tappable. That's not quite true. And, of course, if you use Skype as part of a phone call to or from a regular phone line, those calls would be tappable via traditional phone wiretaps.

The "Skype may be letting law enforcement listen in on your calls" furor took off in the following few days. The Washington Post reported that Skype was making it easier for law enforcement to get text chat and user data. It's not actually clear that this is true either (but more on that later). It then kicked into high gear, when Eric Jackson at Forbes (whom we've written about before for his bizarrely uninformed take on the Yahoo/Facebook patent fight and those who reported on it) wrote a ridiculously ignorant post claiming that Microsoft can listen in on all his Skype calls, based off an incredible misreading of the original post about Skype's refusal to comment directly on the wiretapping abilities.

Jackson's more level-headed colleague, Kash Hill, pushed back on Jackson's claims, but also noted that the law (in the US) is pretty clear that there is no legal requirement for Microsoft to make Skype tappable... but there have been regular efforts made to change that. Hill spoke to legal expert Jennifer Granick who pointed out that just the uncertainty and threat that such legislation might come down the road at some point seemed to be leading companies to make development decisions that left open the possibility of surveillance:

The mere threat of regulation is driving innovation in the direction of backdoors and surveillance compliance. And US law doesn’t require that, yet.

But what's actually happening, since so much of this seems to be conjecture and speculation? Well, as the attention and questions grew, Skype itself weighed in to "clarify." It noted that it has been installing more in-house "supernodes" (in the more distant past, various Skype users would act as supernodes) to improve quality for the directory -- but that Skype to Skype calls (again, not calls that touch the public telephone network) were still encrypted person-to-person calls:

The move to in-house hosting of "supernodes" does not provide for monitoring or recording of calls. "Supernodes" help Skype clients to locate each other so that Skype calls can be made. Simply put, supernodes act as a distributed directory of Skype users. Skype to Skype calls do not flow through our data centres and the "supernodes" are not involved in passing media (audio or video) between Skype clients.

These calls continue to be established directly between participating Skype nodes (clients). In some cases, Skype has added servers to assist in the establishment, management or maintenance of calls; for example, a server is used to notify a client that a new call is being initiated to it and where the full Skype application is not running (e.g. the device is suspended, sleeping or requires notification of the incoming call), or in a group video call, where a server aggregates the media streams (video) from multiple clients and routes this to clients that might not otherwise have enough bandwidth to establish connections to all of the participants.

[....] Skype software autonomously applies encryption to Skype to Skype calls between computers, smartphones and other mobile devices with the capacity to carry a full version of Skype software as it always has done. This has not changed.

But... is there still reason to be somewhat (though not hysterically) concerned? Perhaps. Chris Soghoian has the best post by far on what's known and what's unknown, which explains how Skype's person-to-person encryption may not be as totally untappable as some people assume. He notes that while the Skype to Skype calls are encrypted, Skype has access to the encryption key (he has a full explanation for how/why this is) and then explains what this likely means:

Ok, so Skype has access to users' communications encryption keys (or can enable others to impersonate as Skype users). What does this mean for the confidentiality of Skype calls? Skype may in fact be telling the truth when it tells journalists that it does not provide CALEA-style wiretap capabilities to governments. It may not need to. If governments can intercept and record the encrypted communications of users (via assistance provided by Internet Service Providers), and have the encryption keys used by both ends of the conversation -- or can impersonate Skype users and perform man in the middle attacks on their conversations, then they can decrypt the voice communications without any further assistance from Skype.

So there's a risk there, and Soghoian notes that Skype's reticence to set the record straight on exactly how it handles encryption leaves open this possibility. That is it's entirely possible that there are ways that law enforcement can intercept Skype calls, while Skype can still talk about its encryption, leaving the false impression that the calls are immune from interception. Soghoian also notes that the talk about Skype handing over info (not call access) to law enforcement is not new and has been known for quite some time (and, honestly, doesn't appear all that different from lots of other similar setups).

So, to summarize:

• Skype did make some infrastructure changes recently, which did increase the number of self-hosted supernodes, but those changes likely were to increase the quality of the product, and had little to do with law enforcement/surveillance.
• Skype has always had a program to provide available information to law enforcement if legally required to do so, but appears not to have made any major change to that program in quite some time. That program does not appear to include the ability to listen to calls.
• Skype to phone (or phone to Skype) calls have always been tappable, because they touch the public telephone network, where they can be intercepted.
• Skype to Skype calls remain encrypted, making it more difficult to "tap" them. However, because of the way Skype likely handles encryption keys, this does not mean that governments can't intercept the calls (or impersonate certain parties via Skype).
• In the end, then, it appears that much of this discussion is a whole lot of fuss about nothing particularly new -- but it is worth noting that your Skype calls probably were never quite as secure as you thought they were, even if they're somewhat more secure than some other offerings with little or no encryption and a central server. But if you're looking for 100% secure communications, Skype isn't it -- but that's not because of any change. It's likely always been that way.

Filed Under: law enforcement, privacy, skype, wiretapping
Companies: microsoft, skype

Skype No Longer Willing To Claim That Its Calls Are Untappable By Law Enforcement

from the well-now... dept

For years, we've noted that various governments have sought to be able to wiretap Skype -- and the company has always insisted that its peer-to-peer architecture made it impossible. Last year, however, some hackers suggested that there was now a backdoor in Skype. And now when a reporter for Slate, Ryan Gallagher, is pushing the company on this issue, it refuses to make a clear statement onto the ability to wiretap Skype calls. You can draw your own conclusions.

It is, of course, possible that this is just the tighter-lipped way of Microsoft, now that the software giant owns Skype, but it certainly is raising questions for those who believed that Skype was a safe way to hold conversations away from the ears of increasingly intrusive government surveillance. It seems like there's new incentive for others to work on truly secure voice communications.

Filed Under: privacy, skype, wiretapping
Companies: microsoft, skype

Here We Go Again: FBI Wants Backdoors To Snoop On Nearly All Internet Communications

from the sure,-they-want-it... dept

On Friday, Declan McCullagh over at News.com had the latest reports of the FBI trying to get new laws in place that would require all kinds of internet communication services to include wiretapping back doors, so that law enforcement could tap into them. This isn't a new idea. The FBI has been calling for this for a long, long time. We had mentioned it just last year, but it goes back much further than that. Basically, the FBI is upset that it can't easily tap certain popular VoIP and social networking communication tools. So it wants to effectively force the tech industry to build back doors into pretty much everything.

It's understandable why the government would want this, but that doesn't mean it makes very much sense. First of all, there will always be ways around such taps, and you can bet that major criminals/terrorists are already figuring out how to use systems that are much more protected. Second, as soon as you open up such backdoors, you have pretty much guaranteed that they're going to be abused. Those with nefarious intent will figure out how to access them as well, and people using these systems will be much more at risk, not just of governments spying on their conversations. Second, it's really an impossible task. All that will happen is more alternatives, which will be decentralized and encrypted end-to-end with no possibility of back doors, will likely pop up. The end result won't make it any easier for the FBI to track down real criminals, but will put plenty of non-criminals at risk. Oh, and it will do this while making things much more expensive for any tech company that wants to let its users communicate. That doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Filed Under: encryption, fbi, voip, wiretapping

Just Because It's Now Cheaper And Easier To Spy On Everyone All The Time, Doesn't Mean Governments Should Do It

from the Moore's-Law-strikes-again dept

Rick Falkvinge has another of his fascinating posts up on his Web site, but this one's slightly different from his usual insights into the dysfunctional nature of copyright and patents. It concerns some little-known (to me, at least) history of how Sweden went from being a beacon of freedom to a country under comprehensive surveillance.

As Falkvinge explains, things began with what seemed at the time a very minor matter:

the FRA [a Swedish security agency] had used a loophole in the law since 1976 that allowed it (maybe) to wiretap all phonecalls that were routed over satellites, by erecting their own receiver dishes next to the telco ones. This allowed them to receive all the satellite signals, in identical copies to what the intended receiver dish did. The law they used to justify this behavior was one that said that privacy cannot be expected over radio waves, and that anybody may listen to anything sent over radio -- which makes sense with shortwave-type radio amateur equipment, but not necessarily with satellite links: when you pick up the phone, you expect privacy, regardless of the technical route of the phonecall.

The key thing to note here is that there is a distinction being made between the vast majority of phone calls, and the special class of phone calls made over satellites. That meant that this was not a general spying capability, but a very limited one that only affected a class of users. Falkvinge goes on:

Fiber optics in the ground gradually replaced satellites as the preferred method of transmission, and the FRA complained to the administrative departments that it had lost its ability to wiretap, and wanted an amendment to the law that would -- in their own words -- just "compensate for technical developments".

So the logic here is that the security services were beginning to lose a very limited capability for spying on a special class of user. But note what it demanded as a consequence:

What they asked for was a requirement for every owner of fiberoptics crossing the border to send a mandatory realtime traffic copy to the FRA. They demanded to wiretap everybody, all the time, if your phonecall or internet traffic happened to cross one of these checkpoints (which you can’t tell if it does or not).

So the FRA went from "using a possible loophole in the law to eavesdrop on satellites" to "demanding exactly everything all the time". This was a little bit more than just an update for technical progress; this was a huge difference in scale and a near-complete abolition of the right to privacy.

The key trick employed here was to claim that the change was just to "compensate for technical developments", and that there was some kind of equivalence between the eavesdropping on phone calls via satellites and those made via fiber optics. And it's true that fiber optics largely took over from satellites, but that does not make them equivalent. They are quite different technologies, and spying on one is not the same as spying on the other -- this was not truly about "preserving" a limited spying capability, it was taking advantage of the fact that it was now possible to spy on everyone in the same way, thanks to new technology.

Significantly, this is exactly the same argument that the UK government is making with what it calls its "Communications Capabilities Development Programme" (pdf):

Communications data -- information such as who called whom and at what time -- is vital to law enforcement, especially when dealing with organised crime gangs, paedophile rings and terrorist groups. It has played a role in every major Security Service counter-terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations. Communications data can and is regularly used by the Crown Prosecution Service as evidence in court.

But communications technology is changing fast, and criminals and terrorists are increasingly moving away from landline and mobile telephones to communications on the internet, including voice over internet services, like Skype, and instant messaging services. Data from these technologies is not as accessible as data from older communications systems which means the police and Security Service are finding it increasingly hard to investigate very serious criminality and terrorism. We estimate that we are now only able to access some 75% of the total communications data generated in this country, compared with 90% in 2006. Given the pace of technological change, the rate of degradation could increase, making our future capability very uncertain.

That is why, in the Government’s Strategic Defense and Security Review, published in 2010, we said we would "introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework."

Notice this is couched in terms of "preserving the ability" of security agencies to spy just as they did in the past. In other words, the UK government would have us believe that this is simply preserving the status quo. But as in Sweden, that's not the case here:

We therefore propose to require internet companies to collect and store certain additional information, like who an individual has contacted and when, which they may not collect at present. The information will show the context -- but not the content -- of communications. So we will have for internet-based communications what we already have for mobile and landline telephone calls.

It's still not entirely clear what the UK government wants to gather -- it has been understandably evasive on this front -- but it would seem to include things like recipients of emails, Skype contacts and addresses of Web sites visited (possibly even full URLs, which will point to very specific content.) But the details don't really matter, because this is actually a question of principle.

The UK government, like the Swedish government before it, is trying to set up a false equivalence between monitoring communications before the Internet became a mass medium, and after. But the intrusiveness of such surveillance before the Internet, and before computing power was available to analyze the data gathered, was limited. Back then, working out the network of contacts of a person of interest could be done, but with effort, and at some cost. This ensured that only the potentially most serious threats were investigated.

But once again, Moore's Law has changed everything. What the UK government wishes to gather would allow the entire social graph of everyone in the UK to be calculated in near real-time. It would mean that their every move online could be watched as it happened, and cross-referenced with their past communications history. As Falkvinge points out in another recent post, what has really changed is not so much the ability to spy, but the cost of doing so.

Today, thanks to our networked lives and the plummeting cost of hardware, national governments can monitor everything we do online for the same outlay as the much more limited surveillance of yesteryear. So what is really being preserved is not some supposedly circumscribed spying capability, but the orders-of-magnitude cost. By keeping that cost constant, governments can increase the scope of their spying hugely.

But just because the technology makes it possible, and the economics makes it feasible, doesn't mean governments ought to go ahead and do it. They may claim that they are simply "compensating for technical developments", but really they are trying to exploit those developments to go way beyond what was agreed before as socially acceptable, and to do so without any consultation on how much online surveillance should be permitted in a free society.

And as to the UK government's argument that "we are now only able to access some 75% of the total communications data generated in this country, compared with 90% in 2006", this conveniently skates over the fact that the quantity of such communications data has probably doubled in that time, since IP traffic is currently growing at around 32% annually: in absolute terms, more data is available than ever. This is not about preserving capabilities in order to stand still, it's about running ever faster into a world of total surveillance.

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Filed Under: privacy, rick falkvinge, security, surveillance, wiretapping

NSA Insists It Doesn't Have 'The Ability' To Spy On American Emails, Texts, Etc.

from the are-they-just-lying? dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about an excellent and detailed article in Wired about the efforts by the NSA to collect and store pretty much all communications data they could get their hands on -- whether originating in the US or not (despite clear rules that the NSA is only supposed to deal with foreign threats and communications). Some of that report merely confirmed earlier stories and news reports about programs like the warrantless wiretapping program the NSA runs, as well as deals with major telcos to allow NSA equipment directly on the network at key points to collect data. But parts of it broke some new news about the extent and depth of the NSA's data collection program, as well as its efforts to break the encryption that protects certain communications. As we noted, it was all pretty terrifying.

The article appears to have caught the attention of Congress as well, with Rep. Hank Johnson directly asking NSA boss General Keith Alexander (who you may remember from his FUD warnings about Anonymous taking down power grids) about whether or not various points made in the article are true, and Alexander denies them all, insisting that the NSA has neither the technical nor the legal capabilities to capture and sift through communications from Americans. He clearly states that "the NSA does not have the ability to do that in the United States," which is almost certainly untrue. He repeatedly states that for content in the US, the NSA would need to get a warrant to get this information. To be fair, he may be responding very carefully to Johnson's question, which is directed at the contents of emails or phone conversations -- which does require a warrant. Many of the bigger questions are less about the direct content of the communications but the metadata around those communications. Though, there are some questions about access to the actual content as well, especially when it comes to email. Alexander also insists that the NSA defers to the FBI on matters involving people in the US, even though many, many reports have suggested this is not actually true.

Johnson does press Alexander a bit on the question of whether it's the legal or technical parts that are holding the NSA back, and Alexander repeats that they simply don't have the technical capabilities:

"We don’t have the technical insights in the United States. In other words, you have to have something to intercept, or some way of doing that either by going to a service provider with a warrant or you have to be collecting in that area. We’re not authorized to do that, nor do we have the equipment in the United States to collect that kind of information."

There is a slight pause between "technical" and "insights" in the way he says it, as if he's searching for the proper word before choosing insights, but he later clearly says they don't have the equipment to do so -- which seems to contradict a ton of reports out there from pretty credible sources within the NSA.

As Ryan Singel writes at Wired:

It’s hard to tell here whether Alexander is parsing the questions closely, misspeaking or telling the truth. The heads of the intelligence service have a long tradition of misspeaking or telling untruths that advance their agenda. President George Bush himself on the re-election campaign trail said that no American had been wiretapped without a warrant, which was plainly false, according to numerous news stories and the government’s own admissions of the program.

In the aftermath of those half-truths, the Congress passed, and Bush signed into law, the FISA Amendments Act, which re-wrote the nation’s surveillance laws to give the NSA a much freer hand to wiretap American infrastructure wholesale.

I know that the assumption many will make is that he's flat out lying, and that wouldn't surprise me, but I do wonder if he's trying to pick his words carefully to get around lying—or if he knows he's so protected that he can just say whatever he wants without much fear of ever being called on it.

Filed Under: keith alexander, nsa, privacy, spying, warrants, wiretapping

Hackers Claim That German Officials Have A Backdoor Trojan For Spying On Skype... Which Is A Huge Security Risk

from the breaking-the-internet dept

For many years various governments have complained about the fact that Skype communications are encrypted, and have demanded backdoors. In the US, the FBI has been pushing hard for such backdoors. There have been some reports of applications that allow for wiretapping Skype, despite its supposed encryption, but not much in the way of details. Now the famed Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is claiming to have reverse engineered the "lawful interception" trojan being used by German law enforcement.

They got the program after a lawyer whose client was under investigation gave the CCC his client's hard drive, where the group found the code. As frequently happens with these kinds of things, the CCC found that the trojan actually introduces myriad security problems as well:

The analysis concludes, that the trojan's developers never even tried to put in technical safeguards to make sure the malware can exclusively be used for wiretapping internet telephony, as set forth by the constitution court. On the contrary, the design included functionality to clandestinely add more components over the network right from the start, making it a bridge-head to further infiltrate the computer.

"This refutes the claim that an effective separation of just wiretapping internet telephony and a full-blown trojan is possible in practice – or even desired," commented a CCC speaker. "Our analysis revealed once again that law enforcement agencies will overstep their authority if not watched carefully. In this case functions clearly intended for breaking the law were implemented in this malware: they were meant for uploading and executing arbitrary code on the targeted system."

The government malware can, unchecked by a judge, load extensions by remote control, to use the trojan for other functions, including but not limited to eavesdropping. This complete control over the infected PC – owing to the poor craftsmanship that went into this trojan – is open not just to the agency that put it there, but to everyone. It could even be used to upload falsified "evidence" against the PC's owner, or to delete files, which puts the whole rationale for this method of investigation into question.

[....]

The analysis also revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected. Not only can unauthorized third parties assume control of the infected system, but even attackers of mediocre skill level can connect to the authorities, claim to be a specific instance of the trojan, and upload fake data. It is even conceivable that the law enforcement agencies's IT infrastructure could be attacked through this channel. The CCC has not yet performed a penetration test on the server side of the trojan infrastructure.

"We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities", commented a speaker of the CCC. "The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to '1234'".

Even without the fact that more capabilities can be added, the existing software is pretty powerful. It apparently can remotely control the computers that it's on, take screenshots of what's happening on the computer, including emails and personal messages. And yet, time and time again law enforcement asks us to "trust" them when they want the power to secretly install this kind of crap on people's computers?

Filed Under: backdoor, ccc, germany, hackers, skype, trojan, wiretapping
Companies: skype

IL Court: Eavesdropping Law Violates First Amendment When Used Against People Recording The Police

from the hold-on,-is-this-thing-on? dept

We were just discussing the ruling of a 7th circuit federal judge, Richard Posner, about a controversial Illinois eavesdropping case, in which His Honor seemed to fear that allowing people to record interactions with police would...lead to people recording interactions with police. Or something.

"If you permit the audio recordings, they'll be a lot more eavesdropping.…There's going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers," U.S. 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner said. "Yes, it's a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy."

To me, that sounds an awful lot like saying you can't increase the speed limit on a street to 65 MPH, because then more people will go 65 MPH. That's kind of the point.

In any case, reader Mark informs us that an Illinois State Court has gone the other way, in the Michael Allison case we wrote about a couple weeks ago, ruling that the law cannot apply to interactions with police and court officials as it violates the 1st Amendment. In the Posner article, plenty of commentors (myself included), drew a line between private interactions between citizens and interactions with public officials, arguing that while administering to a public duty, officials ought not be able to hide behind the veil of privacy. Circuit Court Judge David Frankland outlined a similar, if more eloquent, assertion in his opinion:

“'A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen's privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties,' the judge wrote in his decision dismissing the five counts of eavesdropping charges against defendant Michael Allison."

I admit I struggle to see how anyone can disagree. When you're carrying out your public duty, your employer (the public) has a right to document what kind of job you're doing. While, as was Judge Frankland's opinion, we can make some exceptions for the sake of avoiding distractions (Allison actually tried to record in-court proceedings, a no-no), trying to make any of this a felony is downright silly.

The public is the public servant's employer, afterall. And that includes the Justice System as well. It's nice to hear from a judge who hasn't seemed to have forgotten that.

Filed Under: eavesdropping, first amendment, free speech, illinois, michael allison, police, wiretapping

Forget Wiretapping Laws, Now You Might Be Able To Use Copyright Law To Stop Anyone From Recording You Ever

from the this-is-not-what-copyright-is-about dept

There was a recent ruling in a copyright dispute between Swatch (the watchmakers) and Bloomberg that could have troubling implications concerning wiretapping issues. Effectively, it presents a blueprint for how to use copyright law to block otherwise perfectly legal recordings. At issue was that Swatch held an analysts call, as most public companies do regularly. It's pretty standard for various financial firms to push out transcripts of such calls and to report/analyze them. In this case, Bloomberg recorded the call and offered a transcript to its subscribers. Pretty standard stuff. But... here, Swatch claimed copyright on the call. Why? Because they also recorded it (via a partner company), and since that recording was "fixed," they could claim that it was covered by copyright, and then sued Bloomberg.

This ruling was on a motion to dismiss from Bloomberg, which the judge rejected, claiming that Swatch properly established that it had a valid copyright in the recording. It also declined to rule on the fair use claim at this point, though one hopes that, at a later stage, the fair use argument gets a stronger hearing.

The real problem with this ruling is what it could mean when you think about the consequences. As Paul Alan Levy notes, this appears to expand copyright law "far beyond its intended scope." Think about it for a minute. It means that as long as you record yourself while doing something, you can stop anyone from (a) recording you or (b) quoting you, if they quote an amorphous "too much" of what you said in the recording. It's not hard to see scenarios where this is problematic.

Most obviously, at a press conference (which this Swatch call was quite like), a reporter, who pulls out his or her recorder, could be violating the copyright of whoever is holding the conference. Furthermore, if in the process of reporting on the conference, they quote too much of what was said... well, they could face copyright infringement claims.

But let's take it a step further. We just reported on the Massachusetts ruling that said that recording the police was legal. But... what if the police also recorded themselves... and then claimed copyright on that audio. According to this ruling, it's possible that the copyright would be considered legit, and then you'd have to go to court to argue the fair use claim.

That's clearly not what copyright law is intended for, but it's a very real implication of this ruling.

Filed Under: copyright, recording, wiretapping