UN: The Problem With The Internet Today Is It's Just Too Open & Terrorists Might Use It

from the terrorists!-run! dept

Ah, the UN. As highlighted by Declan McCullagh, a new report from the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force, clocking in at an unwieldy 158 pages (pdf) warns that this old internet of ours is just too damn open, and that means terrorists can use it. Thus, it has to stop the openness. The report really is just about that bad: if terrorists might misuse it, it's bad and must be stopped. The costs of locking up all this openness are brushed aside, if they're even considered at all. Among the problems? How about open WiFi?

ISPs may require users to provide identifying information prior to accessing Internet content and services. The collection and preservation of identifying information associated with Internet data, and the disclosure of such information, subject to the appropriate safeguards, could significantly assist investigative and prosecutorial proceedings. In particular, requiring registration for the use of Wi-Fi networks or cybercafes could provide an important data source for criminal investigations. While some countries, such as Egypt, have implemented legislation requiring ISPs to identify users before allowing them Internet access, similar measures may be undertaken by ISPs on a voluntary basis.

It seems like it should be a general rule that, if you're supporting something that includes better surveillance tools by saying, "Hey, Egypt -- the same country that recently had the people rise up to force out a dictator, who tried to shut down the internet -- does it!" perhaps you don't have a very good argument.

The report is basically one big "OMG! But... but... terrorists! Kill it!" It talks about things like "standardizing" data retention rules for ISPs, while we here in the US don't currently have data retention rules -- nor is everyone in agreement that such things are good. Nevermind all that... terrorists!

The development of a universally agreed regulatory framework imposing consistent obligations on all ISPs regarding the type and duration of customer usage data to be retained would be of considerable benefit to law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigating terrorism cases.

Also... all that social media stuff going on out there? Scary, scary stuff because terrorists might use it as well. They might publish propaganda on it, and we can't have that:

The promotion of extremist rhetoric encouraging violent acts is also a common trend across the growing range of Internet-based platforms that host user-generated content. Content that might formerly have been distributed to a relatively limited audience, in person or via physical media such as compact discs (CDs) and digital video discs (DVDs), has increasingly migrated to the Internet. Such content may be distributed using a broad range of tools, such as dedicated websites, targeted virtual chat rooms and forums, online magazines, social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and popular video and file-sharing websites, such as YouTube and Rapidshare, respectively. The use of indexing services such as Internet search engines also makes it easier to identify and retrieve terrorism-related content.

You hear that? All those internet companies, enabling terrorists. Oh, and they're not just handy for terrorists to promote their propaganda... but to sneak up on the dumb users who reveal important info for terrorists as well:

Particularly in the age of popular social networking media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging platforms, individuals also publish, voluntarily or inadvertently, an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on the Internet. While the intent of those distributing the information may be to provide news or other updates to their audience for informational or social purposes, some of this information may be misappropriated and used for the benefit of criminal activity.

Loose fingers on Twitter sink ships, as the saying goes.

Now, of course, some of this is just describing what's going on out there for those who haven't realized that any communications technology can be used by both people with good intentions and bad intentions (and no intentions at all). And we shouldn't freak out about that kind of thing. But, the report does also make some "legislative and policy recommendations," where it gets worrisome:

In order to provide effective criminal justice responses to threats presented by terrorists using the Internet, States require clear national policies and legislative frameworks. Broadly speaking, such policies and laws will focus on:

(a) Criminalization of unlawful acts carried out by terrorists over the Internet or related services;
(b) Provision of investigative powers for law enforcement agencies engaged in terrorism-related investigations;
(c) Regulation of Internet-related services (e.g. ISPs) and content control;
(d) Facilitation of international cooperation;
(e) Development of specialized judicial or evidential procedures;
(f) Maintenance of international human rights standards.

Nice of them to throw in that last one about human rights... because all of those other ones are really about ways to chip away (often with a pretty big digital bulldozer) at human rights and civil liberties. In providing examples of countries that have put in place good anti-cyber-terrorism laws... they list a who's who of countries with dubious human rights records, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. Oh, and China:

In the terrorism context, in China there are provisions criminalizing different forms of terrorist activities, including article 120 of the Criminal Law, which criminalizes activities related to organizing, leading and participating in terrorist organizations. This broad criminalization provision covers a wide range of terrorism-related activities, including those carried out over the Internet.

Of course, if you also get to define what counts as "terrorism," I imagine such laws can be quite handy in making opposition parties and activists disappear (or at least get them to shut up).

There's a lot more in the report like that. While the report pays lip service to "human rights" throughout, it really seems to focus on a whole bunch of ways to chip away at those human rights all because terrorists might be out there, using your internets.

Filed Under: internet, technology, terrorism, un

30 Years Of The CD, Of Digital Piracy, And Of Music Industry Cluelessness

from the didn't-see-that-one-coming dept

A post on The Next Web reminds us that the CD is thirty years old this month. As the history there explains, work began back in the 1970s at both Philips and Sony on an optical recording medium for music, which culminated in a joint standard launched in 1982. The key attribute of the compact disc was not so much its small size -- although that was the most obvious difference from earlier vinyl -- but that fact that it stored music in a digital, rather than analog format.

At the time, that probably seemed a technical detail to most people, but it had two profound consequences. First, it began the shift from a world of analogue music recordings -- LPs and tapes -- to one that was digital. And secondly, it created the pre-condition for the rise of file sharing in the 1990s once the MP3 compression technology had been devised, and the Internet became available to general users -- especially younger ones. Services like Napster would not have been nearly so popular had there not been convenient digital files on CDs just sitting there, waiting to be ripped, uploaded and shared. And the reason it was so easy to do that was because CDs came without any copy protection mechanisms whatsoever.

So how on earth did Philips, Sony and the entire music industry make what must appear in retrospect such a huge blunder? Why did they not worry about people copying files from these new CDs? The answer is very simple: because at the time the CD was launched, there was nothing you could copy a CD to.

One year after the CD's commercial appearance, IBM launched its first version of the PC that had an internal hard disc, the IBM PC XT. Its capacity? A roomy 10 Mbytes. The CD holds around 700 Mbytes, meaning that uncompressed songs typically require around 50 Mbytes of storage each. The cost of any hard disc capable of storing even a single song was so great back in those days, that the idea of digital piracy was self-evidently absurd, since it would have been far cheaper to buy another copy of the CD than a hard disc to store it on.

But what that failed to take into account was the steady and precipitous reduction in the price per Mbyte of hard disc storage that would take place over the next few decades. Today we have reached the point where you can buy a 1 Terabyte hard disc for around $80; that means the cost to store the contents of an entire CD as MP3 files is about $0.005 -- and still dropping.

The CD therefore stands as a wonderful symbol of the music industry's inability to see the deeper, underlying trends in technology, and where they would take us. Back then, it meant that nobody was worried about the idea that people would copy digital files from CDs and share them, because they forgot that technology would make possible tomorrow the things that seemed impossible today. Now it means the copyright industries are still trying to preserve unsustainable 20th century business models instead of planning for the incredible technologies we will have in 10, 20 or even 30 years time. They only have to look at the history of the CD and digital piracy to see just how far things can go -- and how wrong our current assumptions can be.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: cds, drm, innovation, music industry, predictions, technology

Why Regulations Aimed At Technology Almost Always Suck: Or Why Reading Someone's Gmail Isn't Reading 'Stored Communications'

from the don't-let-them-near-technology dept

There have been a couple of stories covering the fact that the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that reading someone's Gmail does not violate the Stored Communications Act, a part of ECPA -- a law we've written about a number of times for being completely out-of-date. Orin Kerr has a good breakdown of the details, if you want to read them. What struck me most, however, is how this case is a near perfect example of the kind of mess we get into when politicians try to regulate technology. Technology changes much, much, much faster than the law, and because of that, you get very silly results. The key issue here is that the Stored Communications Act is now found in 18 U.S.C. 2701 -- and it defines the offense as occurring when someone "obtains, alters or prevents" access to communication "while it is in electronic storage." Now, for the purpose of the law, "electronic storage" is defined over in 18 U.S.C. 2510, with the relevant definition noting:

“electronic storage” means--
(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and
(B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for purposes of backup protection of such communication;

Got that? It must have seemed reasonable at the time it was written, but it makes little sense these days, and is apparently so misaligned with reality today that this one single case interprets that definition in three different ways, and exactly none of those ways agree with a 9th Circuit ruling in Theofel v. Farey-Jones. There's disagreement over the meaning of "backup" in part (B) in particular. Is that backup for the user? Or for the service provider? And then, how do you figure out what is or what is not backup? If a person reads his or her Gmail account, then the message was copied to his or her local machine inside the browser. Thus, it seems reasonable to argue that the copy that remains on the server is a backup copy. But two of the judges in this case argued that because the recipient had not "downloaded" any other copies of the message to store, then the ones on the server were not "backups." This makes little sense because copies were downloaded, but many non-technical people don't understand how browsers really work.

Other judges focus on whether or not your webmail account is really "backup" for the ISP. Either way, the end conclusions: webmail is not considered "electronic storage" under the law for the purpose of the Stored Communications Act. While accessing someone's email can (and likely does) still violate other laws, the very law that most people would probably think most directly applies, almost certainly does not.

The reality is that, when it was passed, back in 1986, it probably seemed to make sense that "stored communications" would only be done for backup. While there were networked client/server type setups at the time, it's doubtful that the folks who wrote the law could have fathomed something like webmail or other online forms of communication. If we're talking about "stored communications" today, it seems ridiculous to have it not cover web-based mail systems or social networks. But the law doesn't seem to support that view -- because the law is incredibly out-of-date. But, of course, the problem with fixing the law is that lawmakers will, again, have trouble figuring out where we'll be just a few years out, and the law may either fail to cover what it thinks it covers or (perhaps worse) cover stuff that should be perfectly legal.

And this, of course, is what we fear when it comes to politicians meddling in technology. Even when they have the best of intentions, technology changes rapidly -- and old and obsolete definitions get left in the law and can create problems or situations that make very little sense. If Congress were able to clean those up quickly, perhaps there wouldn't be a problem, but Congress isn't known for fixing real problems quickly. We've been hearing talk of fixing ECPA for years, and it seems unlikely to happen for a while.

Filed Under: email, regulations, stored communications, technology

Hollywood & The RIAA Won't Let Tech Save Them

from the fighting-the-wrong-fight dept

We've discussed in the past how ridiculous it is to claim that there's a fight between "Hollywood and Silicon Valley." After all, the tech industry keeps creating the tools for Hollywood to succeed and broaden its market... and every time they do so, Hollywood responds by attacking those providing the tools. Every innovation that created a vast new market from which to profit from has been attacked. The gramophone. Radio. TV. Cable TV. The VCR. The MP3 player. YouTube. The DVR. In the end, all of these created great new opportunities, but were attacked. As we've said, it's a very strange war where one side (tech) is building all the weapons for the other side... only to see them point those new weapons at their own feet.

Of course, it's actually even worse than that. Because, not only does Hollywood point these new weapons at their own feet... they then try to sue and blame the tech industry for creating these same weapons. It's a pretty hostile environment.

And this is a massive problem for Hollywood. Because, throughout history, it has been shown that the only solution that actually helps solve the "issue" of "piracy" is the creation of new and useful legitimate services. And the entertainment industry is doing its best to scare everyone off from doing that by attacking each of those new services as it comes about. Entrepreneur Tyler Crowley has a great analogy explaining how the entertainment industry is driving the very innovators it needs help from away. He talks about how entrepreneurs look at markets as "islands of opportunity." He lists out a few, such as the Facebook island and the Apple island.

For tech folks, from the 35,000' view, there are islands of opportunity. There's Apple Island, Facebook Island, Microsoft Island, among many others and yes there's Music Biz Island. Now, we as tech folks have many friends who have sailed to Apple Island and we know that it's $99/year to doc your boat and if you build anything Apple Island will tax you at 30%. Many of our friends are partying their asses off on Apple Island while making millions (and in some recent cases billions) and that sure sounds like a nice place to build a business.

He talks about a few other of these "islands of opportunity" (and does a nice job breaking them down). But then he gets to the "music biz island" (which I'd argue is actually the "legacy entertainment biz island") and notes the hostile reception:

Now, we also know of Music Biz Island which is where the natives start firing cannons as you approach, and if not stuck at sea, one must negotiate with the chiefs for 9 months before given permission to dock. Those who do go ashore are slowly eaten alive by the native cannibals. As a result, all the tugboats and lighthouses (investors, advisors) warn to stay far away from Music Biz Island, as nobody has ever gotten off alive. If that wasn't bad enough, while Apple and Facebook Island are built with sea walls to protect from the rising oceans, Music Biz Island is already 5 ft under and the educated locals are fleeing for Topspin Island.

In other words, the good entrepreneurs, who actually can help the entertainment industry (some of whom tried in the past) are actively pushed away from helping. And then the entertainment industry whines that no one wants to help them. Perhaps they should look at being just a bit more welcoming...

On a side note: Crowley's writeup was actually in response to a dinner gathering at some super super swank LA eatery that tried to bring together the heads of the major labels with some LA entrepreneurs. That's actually encouraging, though, again, meeting in backrooms is still missing the point. Why is it so hard for the industry to have a discussion in public?

Filed Under: dvr, hollywood, mp3, riaa, technology, vcr

Yeah, It Turns Out That Technology Doesn't Make Us Lonely

from the the-lonely-moral-panic dept

Just recently, we were talking about the bizarre claims by Sherry Turkle that social networking makes us more lonely because we spend less time alone (don't try to make sense of it). Soon after that, the Atlantic published an equally vapid feature arguing that Facebook leads to loneliness. These kinds of arguments show up every so often, and they always seem supported by anecdotal evidence.

Perhaps that's because the actual evidence suggests it's a load of crap. Boing Boing points us to a good piece by Claude Fischer in the Boston Review noting that the idea that we're living in an age of increasing loneliness is complete hogwash and not supported by the data at all. First, the article notes just how many articles and books have been claiming the opposite. It seems that claiming that we're all getting more lonely is a lucrative niche sector for the publishing industry. It's one of those things that lots of people want to believe, so books that support that worldview are apparently quite popular. Fischer has compiled a bunch of data looking at their social connections from 1970 to 2010, and finds that "Overall, Americans reported no more loneliness in the 2000s than they did in the 1970s."

It is true that the nature of social relationships has changed, but the difference is just different, not "bad."

The results, which I compiled in Still Connected (2011), show that some aspects of social involvement have changed since the 1970s. In particular, Americans these days sit down to fewer family dinners and host guests in their homes less often; eating and sociability continues, but outside the home. Americans communicate more frequently with their relatives and friends. Critically Americans are not discernibly more isolated—few were isolated at any point in those decades—and Americans remain just as confident of the support family and friends provide.

What the research really shows is that technology is a tool, and people use it for a variety of purposes. Some use it to avoid contact with people, while others use it to increase their contact with people. You can't blame the technology for how people use it. The technology just amplifies the individual aspects of different people:

People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact. True, serious introverts go online to avoid seeing people, but extroverts go online to see people more often. People use new media largely to enhance their existing relationships—say, by sending pictures to grandma—although a forthcoming study shows that many more Americans are meeting life partners online. Internet dating is especially fruitful for Americans who may face problems finding mates, such as gays and older women. Finally, people tell researchers that electronic media have enriched their personal relationships.

People typically turn new technologies into devices for doing what they have always wanted to do. And people like to stay in touch. A century ago, Americans, especially women, turned two new technologies marketed for other purposes, the telephone and automobile, into “technologies of sociability.” Developers of the Internet meant it to be a tool for the military and for scholars, and only a few imagined it might even serve business. Now users have made the Internet a largely social technology.

As the article notes, this doesn't mean loneliness isn't a problem for those who experience it, but it's not a growing problem, and there's no evidence to suggest that social networking or Facebook in particular increases loneliness.

Filed Under: psychology, sherry turkle, social networking, technology

Sherry Turkle Says Technology Is Making Us Lonelier Because We Spend Less Time Alone, Or Something

from the say-what-now? dept

A decade ago psychologist Sherry Turkle was at the forefront of encouraging children to go online so they could better learn to communicate with others. Yet, somewhere over the past decade, she's shifted almost entirely, and joined the "get off my lawn" generation. Her latest is a screed in the NY Times about how all of this social networking makes us all lonely because kids can no longer talk to humans face to face any more. At least that's what I think she's saying. Perhaps it would make more sense if she explained it face to face, because the arguments in the article don't fully make sense. It talks about how the kids these days in the workplace put on headphones and work instead of talking to each other. Some might call that being focused on work rather than chit chat. And, chances are many of them are still talking to each other via instant messaging, which is often more efficient anyway.

Of course, to Turkle, that kind of communicating doesn't count. It's not clear why -- other than it's "different." And therefore it's bad. The argument isn't particularly convincing... and it gets worse at the end. It turns out that actually communicating with people makes us more lonely. We'd apparently all be less lonely if we spent more time alone:

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

Got it? Apparently, communicating with others makes you lonely. Being actually alone makes you less lonely. Why? Because Sherry Turkle says so. Not sure that's particularly convincing.

Filed Under: psychology, sherry turkle, technology

Web Series To Explore The Impact Of The Internet On Heavy Metal

from the beyond-metallica dept

One thing I've always found especially fascinating about the topic of digital technology and its impact on creative industries is the way different artistic communities react. In music, this often plays out along genre lines: the hip-hop community, for example, has a very different view of internet and copyright issues than the classical music community. Thus it's always interesting to hear genre-specific opinions on these topics, where broad debates get replicated in microcosm, and interesting parallels appear.

So I'm looking forward to a new five-part web series called On The Record from the heavy metal website Metal Injection (found through the Metalluminati blog). Among the handful of topics the episodes will explore is the question of how the internet has affected heavy metal, and based on the trailer it looks like this will feature heavily in the series:

The reactions from artists and journalists—or at least the ones highlighted there—are broadly positive, and will be familiar to Techdirt readers. The heavy metal world is an interesting venue for this conversation, since for many people the genre is best-known through Metallica, its pop ambassadors, who are famous for suing Napster and being one of the first bands to take a vocal anti-filesharing stance. It's hardly surprising that their views aren't representative of the broader metal world, but as someone who knows very little about that community, I look forward to hearing from its more progressive members.

Filed Under: heavy metal, music, technology

Japanese Court Misunderstands Autocomplete, Orders Google To Turn It Off To Protect 'Privacy'

from the can't-judges-talk-to-techies? dept

Over the past few years, we've seen a number of lawsuits around the globe concerning Google's "autocomplete" feature, which takes common searches based on what you've already typed and suggests those as potential full searches. The feature can be pretty useful (and also amusing at times). In the US, the entertainment industry has freaked out about it, leading to Google's bizarrely hamfisted censorship of the results.

But that's not good enough for some. We've covered cases in France and Italy where Google was found liable for "suggestions" that a user didn't like (usually associating whoever was complaining with something bad). Of course, that totally misunderstands the feature and suggests that it's actually Google directly saying this is the best suggestion (in fact, I wonder if this is why Google stopped calling this "Google Suggest" and moved to simply calling it "autocomplete").

The latest, as pointed out by TNW, is that a court in Japan has actually ordered Google to turn off the feature entirely, claiming that it's a violation of privacy. Privacy? Huh? Basically, it sounds like a guy complained that searches on his name popped up suggestions with all sorts of bad things (the article says "criminal acts"), and the guy thinks his getting fired and difficulty finding another job was due to this. Of course, it's difficult to see how that's a privacy issue at all, or how it's Google's fault. Google claims that as a US company it has no obligation to obey the injunction.

The thing is, the guy remains unnamed. If he actually named himself, he might solve the problem by promoting more stories about how he's not actually associated with these crimes, and those would likely rise to the top. In the meantime, what does it take for a judge to ask someone who actually understands technology for some pointers before making a ruling that shows a basic ignorance of what the tech does?

Filed Under: autocomplete, japan, judges, privacy, technology
Companies: google

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde Questions Why We Let Dying Industries Dictate Terms Of Democracy

from the seems-like-a-reasonable-question dept

Peter Sunde, a very thoughtful and insightful guy, who's been completely demonized by the entertainment industry for his role with The Pirate Bay, has written up an interesting piece for Wired UK where he not only goes over highly questionable issues related to his conviction, but raises a larger question about why we, as a society, allow one obsolete industry to have so much power in government and policy issues. The connections between those involved in his prosecution and the entertainment industry are simply too numerous to be fair:

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

It's stories like this that raise significant questions about the prosecution. Even if you believe that Sunde was guilty of what he was charged with, I would think you should be able to admit that the list of things above should not have happened under any circumstance. When you read that... and then realize that the guy leading the prosecution against Megaupload for the US DOJ used to work for the industry as an "anti-piracy" exec -- you see the same pattern happening again and again. People who have too close connections to industry are making decisions on these issues designed to protect their industries, rather than looking at the actual impact on society and the economy. That's a pretty big problem, and shows how "regulatory capture" can sometimes become "judicial capture" as well.

Filed Under: communications, corruption, democracy, peter sunde, sweden, technology
Companies: the pirate bay