Rights

There were sharp words on the floor of the US Senate on Wednesday as lawmakers debated the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) and its amendments.

The bill, proposed by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), would allow internet giants and other companies to share people’s personal information with the US government so it can be analyzed for signs of lawbreaking – be it computer related or not.

In return, the companies would get legal immunity from angry customers, although legal action is unlikely because the businesses and the government don’t have to reveal what they have shared, even with a freedom of information request.

The proposed legislation has been criticized by internet rights groups, and also by technology firms. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others published an open letter calling for the legislation to be rewritten, and since then Apple, Salesforce.com, Yelp, and Wikipedia have joined them in opposing the draft law.

Feinstein said organizations won’t be forced to reveal citizens’ private lives to Uncle Sam: it won’t be mandatory for businesses to hand over people’s private records, she claimed.

If you don’t like the bill, you don’t have to do it, Feinstein said.

So it’s hard for me to understand why we have companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and others saying they can’t support the bill at this time. You have no reason, because you don’t have to do anything, but there are companies by the hundreds if not thousands that want to participate in this.

Her colleague Burr said on the floor that he couldn’t understand the opposition to CISA. Businesses against the new law will put their users at risk, he said, because by not sharing people’s personal information, they will not be given intelligence and heads up on attacks from the Feds.

When the companies who are against this get hacked, they are going to be begging to cooperate with the federal government, he opined — via redwolf.newsvine.com

One of the world’s most notorious providers of offensive information technology to governments has had its internal systems breached and customer documentation dumped on the open internet.

Hacking Team, founded in 2003 and based in Milan, Italy, provides surveillance software and intrusion tools to law enforcement agencies around the world.

On its website it boasts clients across the US, Europe and the Asia Pacific, assisted by more than 50 employees providing all aspects of offensive IT tools.

The company’s primary surveillance tool – dubbed Da Vinci – earned it a spot on the Reporters Without Borders Enemies of the Internet list.

Its products allow governments to monitor online communications, record voice-over-IP (VoIP) sessions, remotely activate microphones and cameras, and break encrypted files and emails.

The company’s Twitter account was today compromised, and around 400GB of internal emails, files and source code were leaked to the internet, and spread via social media.

The attackers also posted screenshots of the compromised data from the leaked file to Twitter, and defaced the company’s logo and biography.

Earlier this afternoon — before his own Twitter account appeared to be hacked — Hacking Team engineer Christian Pozzi confirmed the breach and said the company was notifying affected customers and working with police.

According to the leaked data, Hacking Team counts customers from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Mongolia. The company has long maintained it does not sell to oppressive governments — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australia is one of the most aggressive countries in the world in terms of mass surveillance and its techniques could be the subject of future leaks, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first reported on the Edward Snowden revelations for the Guardian, has said.

Greenwald, who now works for The Intercept, told ABC’s Lateline program on Thursday night that Australia is probably the country that has gotten away with things the most in terms of the Snowden revelations.

There are interesting documents about what Australia is doing to privacy rights — not just to their own citizens Glenn Greenwald

Australia is one of the most aggressive countries that engage in mass surveillance as a member of the Five Eyes partnership, he said, referring to a security sharing arrangement between the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

There has been less reporting on Australia than the other four countries. We intend to change that.

We are working on the reporting, he continued. We will definitely get that done as soon as we can — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has said that cutting off advertising from piracy sites is much more effective than censoring the sites from access.

The Australian government last month introduced legislation that would allow rights holders to get an injunction placed on internet service providers (ISPs) to force telcos to block specific overseas piracy websites from access by Australian users.

The rights holders would need to demonstrate that the primary purpose of a website is for the infringement of copyright before the Federal Court will order ISPs to block it. Latest Australian news

The move has been welcomed by rights holders, but faces opposition from Google, which told the parliamentary committee looking into the legislation that site blocking is not the most effective means of stopping piracy.

A recent study of the piracy ecosystem­ in which the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of various anti-­piracy measures found that anti­-piracy efforts directed towards blocking access to pirated content have not been successful, Google said in its submission.

Google said that more effective measures include providing legitimate content that is more attractive to consumers than piracy, and cutting off advertising to piracy websites. The introduction of site blocking could have unintended consequences, Google warned.

Site blocking also has the potential to be used in ways that were unintended, included by blocking legitimate content.

Google said that legislation allowing sites that facilitate access to infringing copyright content to be blocked could lead to virtual private network (VPN) services being blocked.

VPNs also have many other legitimate purposes, including privacy and security, Google stated.

The court should be forced to consider the impact on freedom of speech when blocking sites, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has said that cutting off advertising from piracy sites is much more effective than censoring the sites from access.

The Australian government last month introduced legislation that would allow rights holders to get an injunction placed on internet service providers (ISPs) to force telcos to block specific overseas piracy websites from access by Australian users.

The rights holders would need to demonstrate that the primary purpose of a website is for the infringement of copyright before the Federal Court will order ISPs to block it. Latest Australian news

Dallas Buyers Club wants alleged infringer details by May 6 The censorship end game of the piracy site-blocking Bill Mandatory data-retention funding to be a Budget surprise Google slams Australian piracy site-blocking legislation NBN Co predicts up to 370,000 premises need work on HFC

The move has been welcomed by rights holders, but faces opposition from Google, which told the parliamentary committee looking into the legislation that site blocking “is not the most effective means of stopping piracy”.

A recent study of the piracy ‘ecosystem’­ in which the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of various anti-­piracy measures found that anti­-piracy efforts directed towards blocking access to pirated content have not been successful, Google said in its submission.

Google said that more effective measures include providing legitimate content that is more attractive to consumers than piracy, and cutting off advertising to piracy websites. The introduction of site blocking could have unintended consequences, Google warned.

Site blocking also has the potential to be used in ways that were unintended, included by blocking legitimate content.

Google said that legislation allowing sites that facilitate access to infringing copyright content to be blocked could lead to virtual private network (VPN) services being blocked.

VPNs also have many other legitimate purposes, including privacy and security, Google stated.

The court should be forced to consider the impact on freedom of speech when blocking sites, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has barely even finished introducing piracy site-blocking legislation into the parliament, and already the Helen Lovejoys of the world are trying to get it expanded into a much larger internet censorship scheme.

The legislation introduced into parliament in March would allow film studios, TV companies, and other copyright holders to apply to the court to get specific sites hosted outside of Australia and alleged to be primarily for the purpose of copyright infringement blocked by Australian internet service providers (ISPs).

The court will ideally examine the sites involved, and ensure that they meet all the conditions before ordering a block, though this is not guaranteed at this point.

If the ISPs are ordered to block a site, they can do so in a number of ways — through DNS, IP address blocking, or URL blocking. The exact method, too, has yet to be determined.

Turnbull has stressed that because the court must approve sites being blocked, it is not an internet filter.

It will be a court, not the government, that will determine which sites are blocked. Moreover, this is not an automatic process, but determined by a court with all of the normal protections of legal due process. In other words, a judge will make the decision, after hearing evidence and argument, not an algorithm in the software operating a router, he said.

The lack of an automated process of filtering types of sites means it is not a filter, according to the minister.

Others seem to disagree, however.

Far be it for me to allow the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) to define the meaning of anything ever, but it has described the scheme as an internet piracy filter and called on the government to look at implementing a default clean feed to protect children — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered that five websites be blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism. I do not want to see sites that could lead people to take up arms on the Internet, proclaimed Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

When the block functions properly, visitors to those banned sites, rather than accessing the content of the sites they chose to visit, will be automatically redirected to the Interior Ministry website. There, they will be greeted by a graphic of a large red hand, and text informing them that they were attempting to access a site that causes or promotes terrorism: you are being redirected to this official website since your computer was about to connect with a page that provokes terrorist acts or condones terrorism publicly.

No judge reviews the Interior Ministry’s decisions. The minister first requests that the website owner voluntarily remove the content he deems transgressive; upon disobedience, the minister unilaterally issues the order to Internet service providers for the sites to be blocked. This censorship power is vested pursuant to a law recently enacted in France empowering the interior minister to block websites.

Forcibly taking down websites deemed to be supportive of terrorism, or criminalizing speech deemed to advocate terrorism, is a major trend in both Europe and the West generally. Last month in Brussels, the European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator issued a memo proclaiming that Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat, and argued that increased state control over the Internet is crucial to combating it — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Complex malware known as Regin is the suspected technology behind sophisticated cyberattacks conducted by US and British intelligence agencies on the European Union and a Belgian telecommunications company, according to security industry sources and technical analysis conducted by The Intercept.

Regin was found on infected internal computer systems and email servers at Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian phone and internet provider, following reports last year that the company was targeted in a top-secret surveillance operation carried out by British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters, industry sources told The Intercept.

The malware, which steals data from infected systems and disguises itself as legitimate Microsoft software, has also been identified on the same European Union computer systems that were targeted for surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The hacking operations against Belgacom and the European Union were first revealed last year through documents leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. The specific malware used in the attacks has never been disclosed, however.

The Regin malware, whose existence was first reported by the security firm Symantec on Sunday, is among the most sophisticated ever discovered by researchers. Symantec compared Regin to Stuxnet, a state-sponsored malware program developed by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage computers at an Iranian nuclear facility. Sources familiar with internal investigations at Belgacom and the European Union have confirmed to The Intercept that the Regin malware was found on their systems after they were compromised, linking the spy tool to the secret GCHQ and NSA operations.

Ronald Prins, a security expert whose company Fox IT was hired to remove the malware from Belgacom’s networks, told The Intercept that it was “the most sophisticated malware” he had ever studied.

Having analysed this malware and looked at the [previously published] Snowden documents, Prins said, I’m convinced Regin is used by British and American intelligence services — via redwolf.newsvine.com