Left to chance

King World Copyright Complaint to Digg

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:20:03 PDT

DMCA Notices: King World Copyright Complaint to Digg;
From: King World News To: Digg Inc.
Date: 2010-03-02
Original article at Chilling Effects (database of annotated cease and desist letters)

Yale Law Student Wants Government To Have Everybody’s DNA

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:06:00 PDT

An anonymous reader writes “Michael Seringhaus, a Yale Law School student, writes in the NY Times, ‘To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes.’ In order to prevent discrimination when it comes to collecting DNA samples from criminals (and even people who are simply arrested), he proposes that the government collect a DNA profile from everybody, perhaps at birth (yes, you heard that right).”
Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: “Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of ‘junk’ DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA ‘fingerprint.’ The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Secret Document Calls Wikileaks ‘Threat’ to U.S. Army

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:31:14 PDT

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted Monday on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org – An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? (.pdf) indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.”

The document is classified Secret, and was produced by the Army Counterintelligence Center, under the Department of Defense Intelligence Analysis Program. It appears to underscore the military’s alarm that Wikileaks might be used to reveal United States military secrets, or broadcast disinformation harmful to the U.S.

Neither Wikileaks editor Julian Assange nor the Defense Department immediately responded for comment.

The report, which could not be independently verified, said Wikileaks “could be of value to foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against U.S. forces, both within the United State and abroad.”

The report added that the site “could be used to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; or to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from the website.”

Run by Sunshine Press, Wikileaks has received awards from Amnesty International and has been praised by media groups and others for giving whistleblowers and political dissidents a forum to expose corruption and foster transparency.

Notable leaks include the 238-page U.S. military manual detailing operations of the Defense Department’s Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and a Central Intelligence Agency manual for operating the CIA’s rendition flights, which involved undocumented detainees who were kidnapped in various locations and flown to countries outside the United States for interrogation and torture.

See Also:

Original article at Threat Level

EFF to Urge True Transparency in Congressional Hearing Thursday

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:14:03 PDT

Washington, D.C. – On Thursday, March 18, at 2 p.m., members of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a public hearing on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Obama administration compliance with transparency law. The hearing comes as transparency advocates celebrate Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of our nation’s open government laws that features numerous events measuring the progress made in combating official secrecy.

Senior Counsel David Sobel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will testify at Thursday’s hearing, urging the White House to fulfill its promises for open government. Despite President Obama’s order to government agencies last year to renew their commitment to FOIA, EFF and other organizations still see delays in releasing relevant documents, excuses for not releasing other records, and excessive redactions, among other needless secrecy.

In one case, for example, EFF has compared heavily redacted documents from the FBI released to us under FOIA with documents leaked from a whistleblower containing no redactions. We found that much of the blacked-out content concerns the FBI’s attempts to avoid court oversight of its inappropriate surveillance tactics through the use of generic and legally questionable “umbrella” authorizations. However, these umbrella authorizations had already been revealed to the public in a previous report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. You can see a revealing side-by-side comparison at http://www.eff.org/pages/sunshine2010.

WHO:
David Sobel
Senior Counsel, Electronic Frontier Foundation

WHAT:
“Administration of the Freedom of Information Act: Current Trends”
U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives

WHEN:
2 p.m.
Thursday, March 18

WHERE:
Rayburn House Office Building
Room 2154
Washington, D.C. 20515

For more on the hearing:
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=2&extmode…

For a side-by-side comparison of the FBI redactions:
http://www.eff.org/pages/sunshine2010

Contact:

Rebecca Jeschke
Media Relations Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org

Original article at EFF.org

Sunshine Week 2010: FOIA Could Still Shed More Light

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:07:11 PDT

As the transparency community celebrates Sunshine Week, we here at EFF are reminded that most of the federal agencies we seek to monitor through our Freedom of Information Act work continue to cloak their activities in excessive secrecy. We have grown accustomed to receiving agency documents with large amounts of information blacked out — or “redacted” in the official parlance. While we often suspect that many of these deletions are made to conceal innocuous, or perhaps embarrassing, information, it is usually impossible to confirm those suspicions. But in some rare instances, we are able to learn precisely what a recalcitrant agency has improperly withheld from public view.

Such an opportunity recently arose when the Washington Post published a series of internal FBI e-mail messages concerning the Bureau’s abuse of national security letter (NSL) authority. NSLs are used to obtain, among other things, telephone toll billing records and subscriber information, and electronic communication transactional records. In a report issued in March 2007, the Justice Department’s Inspector General concluded that the FBI had systematically violated the law by improperly issuing hundreds of NSLs without proper authorization. Within days of the IG’s report, EFF submitted a FOIA request to the FBI for documents detailing these abuses. Of the tens of thousands of pages of material that the Bureau eventually identified as responsive to our request, the vast majority of the relevant information was redacted.

The e-mail messages published by the Washington Post were obtained from an FBI whistleblower who had been directly involved in the Bureau’s handling of NSLs. Through a careful comparison of the redacted material originally released to EFF with the unredacted messages recently published by the Washington Post, we were able to see precisely what the Bureau withheld. We were particularly struck by the fact that the FBI redacted all references to a proposal that had been floated within the Bureau to legitimize questionable demands for communications records — so-called “exigent letters” — a plan that the DOJ Inspector General clearly described in his report:

Our review of contemporaneous e-mail communications . . . found that for nearly 2 years, beginning in late 2004, [FBI National Security Law Branch] attorneys counseled CAU [Communications Analysis Unit] officials to take a variety of actions, including . . . opening “umbrella” investigations out of which national security letters could be issued in the absence of another pending investigation. . . .

The Assistant General Counsel at first proposed the establishment of six “generic” or “umbrella” investigations representing the recurring types of threats investigated by the Counterterrorism Division. The proposal contemplated that the FBI would issue national security letters from these files in exigent circumstances when there were no other pending investigations to which the request could be tied.

As the side-by-side comparison of the redacted and full-text e-mail messages shows, the FBI withheld all references to its proposal to use “generic” or “umbrella” investigations as a rationale to justify questionable demands for sensitive information relating to private communications. It is worth noting that the FBI continued to withhold this information even after President Obama and Attorney General Holder announced that a new “presumption of openness” should guide agency FOIA implementation. Despite the Attorney General’s assertion that the Justice Department would only defend an agency’s decision to withhold information if it could demonstrate a “foreseeable harm” from disclosure, in this instance DOJ attorneys defended the FBI’s withholding of information that was revealed by the Department’s own Inspector General three years ago.

FOIA is a powerful tool, and this example of over-redaction demonstrates the need to continue seeking a culture of transparency and trust from our government. President Obama took the first step by declaring that “[a]ll agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government,” and organizations like EFF are making sure that the government remembers its promise. But Sunshine Week exists to remind citizens, journalists, members of Congress, and folks both inside and outside the transparency movement to continue seeking honest disclosure using all the tools that exist: rigorous investigations, hearings, and actual, public oversight.

Original article at EFF.org

US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:59:00 PDT

An anonymous reader writes “This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). ‘The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.’ It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ‘trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,’ the report recommends ‘The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.’ [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ‘Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.’ The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EFF Experts to Speak at Privacy Roundtable in Washington, D.C.

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:45:07 PDT

Washington, D.C. – On Wednesday, March 17, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting its final public roundtable on technology privacy challenges in Washington, D.C. Two experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are taking part.

EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley and EFF Boardmember Edward W. Felten will discuss “Internet Architecture and Privacy” at the first panel of the day. Later panels will cover health information privacy and issues around other sensitive information, as well as lessons learned so far and future plans for privacy protection.

For more information on attending the roundtable including a full agenda, visit http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/privacyroundtables/index.shtml

WHAT:
FTC Roundtable “Internet Architecture and Privacy”

WHEN:
Wednesday, March 17
9:15 a.m.

WHERE:
FTC Conference Center
601 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

For more information on the roundtable:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/privacyroundtables/index.shtml

Contact:

Rebecca Jeschke
Media Relations Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org

Original article at EFF.org

Iran Hacks US Spy Sites

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:45:00 PDT

superapecommando writes “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked into 29 websites affiliated with US espionage networks, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported on Sunday. ‘The hacked websites acted against Iran’s national security under the cover of human rights activities,’ Fars reported. It did not disclose details of the attacks.
The Internet has been used by Iranian opposition groups who contested the results of last year’s elections there to organize demonstrations and share information about protests and arrests. The Revolutionary Guards is a military group that was founded after Iran’s 1979 revolution. The group includes conventional army, navy, air force, and intelligence units, as well as the Basij paramilitary force and various business units.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientology Tries To Block German Documentary

phil — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:59:00 PDT

eldavojohn writes “The Guardian is reporting on the strained relationship that Scientology is having with the German government and the airing of a pesky documentary on Southwest Broadcasting. Until Nothing Remains, a $2.3 million documentary, is slotted to air on German television at the end of this month. It recounts the true story of Heiner von Rönn and his family’s suffering when he tried to leave the Church of Scientology. A Scientology spokesperson called the film false and intolerant and also said they are investigating legal means to stop the film from being aired. More details on the film can be gleaned here.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filter Vendor Agrees Aussie Censorship Can’t Work As Promised

phil — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:00:00 PDT

Acidspew writes “The Australian Government’s plan to filter the Internet has caused furore and has been met with vehement objection. Many people have put their opinions forward regarding this matter, but this time around, M86 Security — the vendor that provided many ISPs equipment during the initial filter trials — has finally weighed in on the discussion. Six of the nine ISP participants in the URL-based Internet filter trial last year used M86’s R3000 filtering kit. According to ARN: ‘Internet filtering won’t prevent people deliberately looking for inappropriate material from accessing blocked content, according to security vendor M86 Security.’ The company continues by saying its filter gear was designed to be implemented into schools and enterprise businesses, not for an entire country. The article also touches on M86’s views on censorship.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.