All Content Related to United States of America

Porn on Planes?

jillian — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:42:17 -0400

The recent announcement from American Airlines regarding wireless Internet service on airplanes has caused quite a stir. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants have raised concern about passengers viewing questionable content during the flight. That questionable content, specifically, would be porn.

Although most people would agree that viewing pornography during a commercial flight is a no-no, it seems that both flight attendants and passengers worry that some might try to do so anyway and have launched a campaign for American to filter its in-flight wireless service. The airline, however, has instead chosen to leave monitoring up to flight attendants, who by all accounts already have plenty of work to do.

According to Fox News, Delta, Alaska, and Northwest, all plan to roll out unfiltered Internet service soon, while JetBlue and Continental intend to filter some content. International airlines also plan to follow American's lead, with the exception of Australia's Qantas.

The hope is that people will use their own good judgment while flying the friendly skies, but what if they don't? Should flight attendants be responsible for determining what constitutes an offensive site?

On the other hand, is filtering the right choice? And will it even be effective? There are two major issues behind this possibility.

GoGo, the company which supplies wireless Internet to the airlines, already filters VOIP (voice over internet protocol) services from fliers, so as not to disturb passengers by allowing customers to make phone calls. Even still, some passengers have already managed to evade this block. Therefore, there's nothing stopping them from evading a block on pornography.

The other issue is in defining "offensive content". Although most frequent fliers would certainly oppose the viewing of porn during a flight, where should the line be drawn? If children are the main concern, should content containing vulgar words or scantily clad women be filtered as well?

While adding wi-fi to flights is a positive for most, there are concerns that come along it, whether filtered or not. Even if what you're viewing would not be deemed offensive by your neighbor, it's worth considering if you'd want your neighbor to see it at all. USA Today suggests investing in a privacy screen to avoid allowing anyone to see your work.

Another potential solution, and one that would find support even from those with no desire to use in-flight wi-fi, would be to create separate family and adult sections that would allow adults to sit away from children, thus eliminating the need for filtering.

U.N. agency to draft possible limits on Internet anonymity

rebekah — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:46:59 -0400

A document obtained by CNet News has revealed that the U.N National Security Agency is part of a group drafting a set of technical standards determining how to trace Internet communications back to their original sender, potentially limiting users' ability to remain anonymous, according to a report published Friday.

The group, named Q6/17, is headed by the U.N. International Telecommunications Agency (ITU) and is reportedly acting on a proposal submitted by the Chinese government. The group is meeting in Geneva this week to work on the proposal, and meetings are closed to the public.

The proposal is intended in part to fight distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, but experts claim most experienced hackers would still be able to avoid detection.

The report has raised concerns among digital freedom advocates, who claim the standards would violate human rights and who cite the potential for abuse by governments who may use tracebacks to identify and "quash" political opponents.

Steve Bellovin, a Columbia University computer scientist and IETF member who drafted a different tracebook proposal in 2000, criticized the Q6/17 approach in a recent blog post, saying, "Network design should have as a primary goal the efficient operation of a network. Naturally, security is an important design consideration; the question, though, is what security really means. There are lots of possible definitions; to me, though, none of them include political censorship."

Online anonymity is a legal right in the United States and is recognized by international organizations including the Council of Europe and the ITU itself. Though the U.N. lacks the authority to enforce global Internet standards, the Q6/17 group plans to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the United States Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center. This collaboration could lead to acceptance of the standards by national governments.

The proposal is scheduled to be finished next year.

YouTube, Scientology and the DMCA

jillian — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:45:58 -0400

You've all seen the anti-Scientology protests; a group known as Anonymous, wearing Guy Fawkes, protest outside various churches of Scientology, or most recently here in Cambridge, outside of an exhibit aimed at teaching people about the religion. Many such protests have been videotaped, then uploaded to YouTube. Several users have also posted responses to protests.

Late last week, it was reported that American Rights Counsel LLC had sent over 4,000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube on the basis that some anti-Scientology videos on the site violated copyright. One such video is this one from Ironhead097, entitled "To Anonymous/Scientology":

During a span of twelve hours on September 4 and 5, several videos were removed and several users banned. YouTube users responded with DMCA counter-notices, and as a result, a number of accounts have been reinstated.

Subsequent investigations by YouTube users into the "American Rights Counsel LLC" have proved fruitless; a simple Google search shows that the company does not have a main website. In fact, every mention of the "American Rights Counsel LLC" on Google relates to Scientology.

The question is: Who are the American Rights Counsel LLC? This video, posted by a member of the group "Anonymous" asks the same question:

If, hypothetically, the claims in the video are correct and a member of Scientology has filed the DMCA notices fraudulently, there are legal ramifications. According to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse:

"Subsection 512(f) attempts to limit false and fraudulent claims of copyright infringement under the DMCA. Anyone who fraudulently claims copyright infringement or fraudulently claims that non-infringing material was wrongly removed, or that access to it was wrongfully disabled, is liable to anyone who suffers any damages because of that misrepresentation, including court costs and attorney's fees"

Whether the claims are true or not, this is ultimately a free speech issue as well as a potential legal one that should spur discussion yet again on the fairness of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Bloggers Unite Against FISA Bill

amina — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:19:38 -0400

Since the Senate approved the new FISA bill, the blogosphere has been in a state of upheaval, declaring it an infringement on the Bill of Rights. NPR recently reported that liberal and conservative bloggers have joined forces to oppose the legislation by raising money to launch ads against those Congressmen who supported it. The rewrite of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants retroactive immunity to telephone companies which cooperated with the NSA’s post-9/11 domestic spy program, has received widespread opposition from the online community for allotting “the president too much power to tap into private communications without court oversight.”

Reminiscent of complaints from the Brazilian blogosphere about Brazil’s new cybercrime bill, American bloggers across the political spectrum remain skeptical of Congressmen’s claims that protecting citizens is the FISA bill’s primary purpose. Many bloggers have expressed their disappointment in Democrats’ decision to give in to the legislation, which has caused an online rift among Obama supporters who urged the senator to “get FISA right” on his website.

FISA has raised concerns in the civil liberty community about how much information government surveillance technology, such as filters and data searches, will collect. The ACLU implored a no vote on the bill and listed several talking points against it, including that it “permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States, without any individualized review, and without any finding of wrongdoing.”Government representatives, too, have echoed these fears. In his interview with Amy Goodman from DemocracyNow! Senator Russ Feingold found the bill to be “one of the greatest intrusions, potentially, on the rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution in the history of our country.”

The FISA debate continues to intensify the dialogue surrounding the relationship between ever-evolving electronic surveillance technologies, government transparency and liability, and how we define privacy and individual citizen rights in the digital age.

Global Online Freedom Act: How Do We Stop "Illegitimate" Law Enforcement?

brendan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:26:57 -0400

Congress is considering new legislation to prevent US companies from assisting the censorship and surveillance regimes of so-called Internet-Restricting Countries (IRCs): China, Iran, and so forth. On balance, the Global Online Freedom Act would probably help companies make smarter decisions about blocking and monitoring its customers, and at the very least would provide some valuable data on just what is being blocked and monitored. Yet the bill has some serious flaws which would not help the cause of Internet freedom, and would probably hurt it. You can read about Sec. 201, which would force companies to relocate servers out of IRCs, on Jonathan Zittrain's blog. This post focuses on Sec. 202, which would prevent companies from giving customers' personal information to governments for purposes the Department of Justice did not deem "legitimate." (Just what is an "illegitimate" government purpose? It's hard to say, though the bill states that any effort for "control, suppression, or punishment of peaceful expression of political or religious opinion" would fall under that category)

US companies ought not to violate fundamental human rights, and to the extent that Sec. 202 prevents them from doing so, that is a good thing. But under Sec. 202, any company that complied with an illegitimate request - say, by handing over the emails of a Chinese journalist - would face hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil liabilities, and the officials within the company would face up to five years in prison. The trouble is, if a company refused to comply with an illegitimate request, it might face similar liabilities from the IRC. Put in such a bind, a US company might simply opt out of doing business in an IRC and be replaced by a less scrupulous indigenous company.

If we want to prevent IRCs from making illegitimate requests, rather than just prevent US companies from assisting them, we need to do more. Here are three suggestions:

Make surveillance costly: by making Internet privacy a formal consideration point in trade deals and foreign aid pacts with the US government, IRCs may find it unattractive to persist in their surveillance regimes. And by making Internet openness a formal consideration in international trade dispute mechanisms, companies within IRCs might find it appealing to pressure their governments to reform.
Make surveillance illegitimate: By setting an example of freedom and innovation around the world, the US can show that openness and prosperity go hand-in-hand. Therefore the US ought to re-examine its own censorship and surveillance policies before trying to reform the policies of others.
Make surveillance useless: By giving citizens access to technologies like Tor and Anonymizer, the US can make it impossible for governments to track political, religious, and personal communication. In this way, IRCs can continue to request private consumer information from US companies, but the companies simply won't have anything to give.

But don't let all this criticism overwhelm: GOFA is, on balance, a good bill. But as I have written elsewhere, it alone cannot make the Internet more free: it needs smart users and responsible companies to help.

Palfrey Testifies on Complying with Foreign Censorship Laws

brendan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:14:30 -0400

An increasing number of American companies are being asked to obey censorship and surveillance laws in China that run contrary to free speech and privacy guarantees in the United States. These companies have been asked to monitor Internet users' activities, to give subscriber information such that the government can monitor users itself, and to release private communications of accused political dissidents.

Faced with such requests, most companies have complied with Chinese laws. In 2005, Yahoo! released the private emails of journalist Shi Tao, emails which eventually led to Mr. Shi's incarceration. In 2006, Microsoft prevented users from creating blog posts with "democracy" in their titles. And today Google limits its search results in China for controversial topics such as the Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.

Some companies are even profiting from censorship. A newly leaked Powerpoint presentation reveals that Cisco Systems executives saw China's desire to censor the Falun Gong as an opportunity to sell filtering technologies.

Observing that most companies have complied with Chinese law, Congress is considering legislation to force these companies to adhere to American standards of freedom of speech and privacy protection. The Global Online Freedom Act would require that ICT companies operating outside the US not release private user information to governments, except for “legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes” (the Justice Department would decide what constitutes a legitimate purpose)

This May, the Berkman Center's Executive Director, John Palfrey, submitted written congressional testimony to Congress about this and related bills. "At this moment of dynamic change," Prof. Palfrey wrote, "it would be premature to act now with blunt legislation." A legislative approach would simply discourage companies from investing in countries like China, where emerging indigenous ICT companies, less likely to adhere to any privacy and free speech guarantees, would take their place.

Rather, Prof. Palfrey suggested that companies develop a set of standards regarding which censorship and surveillance laws to comply with, and which to fight. Such an effort is already underway. Today the Center for Democracy and Technology, Business for Social Responsibility, the Berkman Center and several ICT firms are working to develop a code of conduct for companies operating in regimes which lack U.S.-style privacy and free speech guarantees. Some initial discussions of this collaboration are available here and here.
This doesn't mean that the government has to stand still as ICT companies regulate themselves. Palfrey suggested that Congress take action on the following:

1. Support research on and awareness of existing censorship practices
2. Fund technologies to promote internet freedom
3. Create regular exchanges between the government, ICT sector, human rights organizations, and academic researchers
4. Provide incentives for companies to participate in this industry-wide code of conduct
5. Lead the way as a government on privacy and freedom of speech
6. Encourage companies to inform users about possible violations to their privacy
7. Consider codifying the code of conduct, once it's developed.

Of course, none of these suggestions are uncontroversial, nor is the industry-wide code of conduct Prof. Palfrey is working to develop. Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch, who testified at the same hearing, argued that:

"A voluntary [industry] initiative will not apply to companies that do not join and it is difficult to see how it will get effectively implemented in countries where the government is very good at dividing and pressuring companies to capitulate to its demands, sometimes in exchange for access to a lucrative market. And most importantly, a voluntary initiative may be least effective in curtailing governments’ efforts to obtain user information about cyberdissidents from companies, because a voluntary effort is not sufficient to stand up against the pressures a government can assert against companies."

You can read the full testimony of Mr. Ganesan here and the testimony of all the witnesses here. You can also track this ongoing debate, and learn more about the industry code of conduct as it develops, here

Can The Government Censor Wireless Broadband?

brendan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:43:06 -0400

Free wireless broadband has been a goal of academics, activists, and politicians for years, and M2Z, a new start-up led by former FCC official John Muleta might give it to them. Unfortunately, it will not be the broadband they’ve been looking for, because the FCC has proposed that M2Z “filter[] or block[] images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography.”

Now, Wendy Seltzer and ONI’s Sally Walkerman have already written some great posts about how this sort of restriction would hurt innovation and free speech. This post focuses on the potential legality of such regulation.

The US government has tried once already to prevent minors from finding pornography online: it was the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and key portions of it were ruled unconstitutional a year later in Reno v. ACLU. The reasons the court overturned those provisions are highly relevant to the proposal the FCC is making today.

Television and radio, the court observed, have been regulated by the government since their inception. Additionally, they are inherently scarce media: there just isn’t enough spectrum to present every possible view. And relatedly, they are traditionally invasive media: if a television is on in a public room, it’s hard not to pay attention. For these three reasons the court believed itself justified in regulating certain content on TV and radio.

Justice Stevens, writing for the majority in Reno, observed that none of these conditions exist for the Internet. There is no substantial history of regulating cyberspace, nor is its content scarce, nor is it an inherently invasive medium: computers in public places are easily ignored.

Furthermore, with TV or radio it is comparatively easy to control content at its creation: NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox are all headquartered in the United States. If they broadcast pornography they can be sued, or if necessary, their executives can be arrested. But no such legal options exist online. It is virtually impossible to control content from the source of creation – there are too many people creating content in too many different places to effectively regulate them all.

And so, the court ruled, the government could not regulate pornographic content online for the purpose of protecting children. Would this ruling apply to the FCC’s proposed standards for M2Z? It’s an interesting question. While M2Z’s network like television or radio would be carried over the airwaves, its content would not be scarce or invasive in the way radio and television content is. And while the wireless network would be free, making it easier for children to find Internet access outside the home, it would remain easier to censor at the end-user, not the content-creation level. Of course, all this is just speculation – these proposed rules may not even be adopted. But you can contribute to the debate by filing a comment with the FCC here (the proceeding number is 07-195)

Wireless: you might not have to pay for it, but it won't be free, says FCC

sally — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:03:34 -0400

Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a report , addressing their efforts to build broadband access. So far, recent efforts have centered around auctioning off portions of the wireless spectrum, and some with the requirement that the spectrum be used to offer free wireless connectivity. Don't get too excited yet. Free (as in you don't pay for it) wouldn't quite be free. Provisions to require companies offering free wireless to block pornography - "content harmful to minors". This could require the blocking of many hard-to-monitor uses of the Net, such as encrypted messaging and VOIP.

Wendy Seltzer points out:

To block naked pictures among the 1s and 0s of Internet data, you need first to know that a given 11010110 is part of a picture, not a voice conversation or text document. So to have any hope of filtering effectively, you have to constrain network traffic to protocols you know, and know how to filter. Web browsing OK, peer-to-peer browsing out. You’d have to block anything you didn’t understand: new protocols, encrypted traffic, even texts in other languages. (The kids might learn French to read “L’Histoire d’O,” quelle horreur!) “Should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications as part of the AWS-3 free broadband service, to ensure that inappropriate content … not be accessible as part of the service.”

We often write about how ineffective filtering is at blocking access to content, and how difficult it is to be accurate -- blocking only what is unlawful, no more, no less. This case brings up several disturbing points. First, pornography (with the exception of child pornography) is not illegal in the United States. It is only illegal to provide it to minors. Internet service providers cannot determine who is a minor and who is not, creating a situation of blatant overblocking for any user over the age of 18 (even if they get the block list right in the first place). Second, to block access to technologies, simply because they could carry porn is not even close to an option under the first amendment. It may, instead, be up to all of us to come up with better ways to carry out age verification and the like. The FCC is stretching uncomfortably into content control territory, from which precedent and common sense advise staying away.

Whack-a-Mole in New York

Rob — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:32:12 -0400

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on June 10th an “unprecedented deal” with Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint to “block major sources of child pornography.” The political logic of this action is abundantly clear, though it will have little impact on the spread of child pornography on the Internet.

The New York Times reports that the approach taken by Cuomo’s investigators was to pose as subscribers and file complaints with the ISPs regarding child pornography on their networks, despite user agreements that do not permit such activity. “After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.”

The background to this story is that previous attempts to legislate mandatory Internet filtering in the U.S. have been overturned by the courts. The legal and practical obstacles to controlling online speech in a country that values free speech as highly as the U.S. have proven to be too great so far. (See here)

Therefore it is not surprising to see the emergence of creative approaches that coerce ISPs into taking action. Unfortunately, the chosen approach doesn’t seem to pass a reasonable benefit-cost test.

There are a few dimensions to the announcement, none of which involve filtering web sites. The agreement stipulates that these three ISPs will “purge their servers of child porn websites.” This makes sense, though it is not new or surprising. Child pornography is a crime and hence is not protected speech. The aspect that is new and somewhat troubling is that the organization which maintains a list of web sites that include child pornography, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), is a non-governmental organization and would carry out its role with no judiciary oversight, no transparency and no accountability to the public. The announcement states that the NCMEC “regularly reviews and updates its registry of these illegal sites to ensure the list reflects the current presence of such websites on the Internet.” However, there is no way to be sure the list is not over-inclusive, including sites that do not contain illegal content. These same problems of targeting, effectiveness, transparency and accountability plague similar initiatives designed to reduce illegal content in other western countries, including Finland, Canada,
and the UK.

The NCMEC obviously has no authority to decide what is illegal. What they can provide is opinions regarding what they believe are web sites that contain illegal material. This allows others, such as ISPs, to act upon this information if they so choose, or in this case, if they are threatened with unwanted legal attention, blurring the line between a legal mandate and voluntary industry action in a process guided by the determinations of a group with no legal authority.

Another component of the agreement stipulates that these three companies will “eliminate access to child porn Newsgroups, a major supplier of these illegal images.” The target here is Usenet, the newsgroup service that has played a central role in the evolution of the Internet, predating the World Wide Web by more than a decade. For almost thirty years, Usenet has hosted discussions that cover a wide range of topics from science, technology and current events to arts and culture. The architecture of Usenet is designed such that many servers around the world host material that is posted. ISPs that host Usenet will be therefore unwitting hosts to any illegal material that is uploaded onto the Usenet network. Cuomo’s investigation team found 88 Usenet groups (out of the more than 100,000 newsgroups) that contain child pornography. The New York State investigators found illegal material to be contained on one of the nine Usenet hierarchies, the alt.* section, which includes over 10,000 newsgroups. Declan McCullagh reports that the ISPs will deal with this in different ways. Sprint plans to block the alt.* newsgroups. Time Warner Cable will drop all Usenet services. Verizon hadn’t decided how to implement the agreement, though would probably block the alt.* groups. This approach would thereby suppress more legitimate speech than illegal content, reminiscent of the baby-bathwater combination that U.S. courts have overturned in the past.

This deal is another example of a major recurring theme in Internet filtering seen around the world—unless targeting a very small number of sites where individual legal review is possible, blocking attempts will fail to eradicate the targeted content while inappropriately removing unrelated material, in this case thousands of newsgroups. The real impact of this agreement on the spread of child pornography is minimal at best. Although still open to interpretation, the impact on free expression will be greater. Some users that subscribe to legitimate Usenet services might be deterred by this, while determined Internet users will be able to access Usenet via a number of web-based services.

At issue is the precedent and mechanisms. The sad fact of the matter is that there are no technical means that will effectively block child pornography on the Internet without stomping on the right to free speech. Nor can it be said that there is no harm in trying. No one should be declaring victory over this agreement.

Order to shut access to Wikileaks doesn't shut access to Wikileaks

sally — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:59:36 -0500

Last Friday, a California court ordered that domain name registrar Dynadot remove DNS information that routes Internet users to wikileaks.org, a site that provides a place for people to leak documents or blow whistles on corporations or governments.

Our friends at the Citizen Media Law Project have some fantastic analysis of the issues inherent with ordering the site to be rendered inaccessible, here and here, and they continue to dig through the various complaints and orders for some sense of understanding. The justifications for the order are weak, and there is no U.S. precedent for ordering the shutdown of an entire site based on the complaints of one organization affected by activities on the site. The complaint is vague, while the suggested remedy is specific and ineffective.

It has been pointed out by Jonathan Zittrain, Nart Villeneuve, Wikipedia's article on wikileaks, and others that the site is not inaccessible. It is available directly via entering the IP address, http://88.80.13.160/, and on mirror sites such as those found here (http://www.wikileaks.be), here (http://wikileaks.org.uk), here (http://wikileaks.cx), here (http://wikileaks.in).

The blocking of this site by removal of DNS information is such an easily circumventable method it is hard to believe the parties might have thought it would be an effective means for stopping access.