Tag Archives: SOPA

Anonymous a "stateless" terror organization?

Posted on by

According to the Wall Street Journal the NSA is seriously considering labeling Anonymous a stateless organization. The Atlantic has some good discussion about this topic as well. I think this is something we should all be seriously concerned about. This has the serious problem of becoming something beyond scope like the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. These both allow the US to pursue military objectives in countries across the world for various different reasons. The War on Drugs mostly impacts the US, Mexico and large chunk of South America while the War on Terror allows the US to do the same in the US, nearly all of the Middle East and parts of Asia such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now the US government is afraid that Anonymous was going to eventually target the US electric grid. This seems out of the scope of Anonymous for a few reasons, one they outline as that people’s lives depend on the electric grid. Additionally, there’s serious problems since Anonymous is much more dispersed than some of the other organizations that the US has focused on it will be difficult to determine something that was actually caused by Anonymous or something that some one claims was conducted by Anonymous.

It is likely that someone could claim to be a part of Anonymous and that they did an attack against something as serious as an electric grid but it will be difficult to prove that they did. Especially when there is a great deal of IP spoofing (this is a way of making a computer think your IP address (where you are on the physical internet connection this comes from your internet service provider) is a different IP address) going on and people will claim to be part of a group when they aren’t.  I think that this will open a large can of worms.

Additionally, it brings up other concerns one that may impact me directly, will the NSA start looking at bloggers that are sympathetic to the ideas of Anonymous, using the web as a protest tool. If so then I’ve been overly sympathetic. That’s not all though, during the SOPA/PIPA protests Anonymous sent out tweets with links that turned people into Low Orbit Ion Cannon (a software program) that commits Distributed Denial of Service attacks (brings down a web page). Essentially, even without being a part of Anonymous you become part simply by clicking a link on Twitter.

Are these people now linked with Anonymous and liable for any action the group does? These are serious questions that really need to be addressed if an announcement is made that Anonymous is a “stateless” organization. This also makes it very important to understand what protesting on the internet is allowed and what is not allowed. Sure Anonymous does steal information, but the information they steal seems to be fairly unsecured and not encrypted. It’s time to have a real talk about all this means.

Protecting the internet

Posted on by

As I mentioned in my blog post from yesterday, the internet is extremely important. We all know that. It’s fun to use it’s become an incredibly important part of our economy and will continue to grow in general importance. In some ways Thomas Friedman is correct in the book the World is Flat, the internet has increased the ability for people all over the world to compete in the same way. However, where he goes wrong is that he assumes that this flattening and economic importance will protect the internet.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case. We, the users of the internet, will have to continually work to protect the internet from special interest groups that seek to control its use. We have seen this in the US with SOPA/PIPA and with ACTA in Europe (And now Trans Pacific Partnership). A small group of companies in an industry that isn’t really able to innovate is attempting to dominate the manner in which the internet is being used. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, there are already more agreements in the works. The most recent in the US is a bill being pushed by our dear friend Lamar Smith from Texas. Yup, same guy that did SOPA he’s pushing a law that will require all ISPs to collect data on their users and store it for over 6 months. In addition websites are going to be required to collect similar data. The goal of the bill is to prevent child pornography.

This type of law is also being considered in Canada and there was a recent protest where a twitter user was pretending to be Vic Toews. This has rather upset Mr. Toews an MP there. However, these bills essentially destroy any sort of privacy on the internet. In many cases web companies simply hand over data to law enforcement agencies and governments without any need for a warrant or a court order. Twitter is one of the few companies that puts up a fight about user data. As users we really don’t know how often our data is being handed over to any sort of governmental organization.

In addition to these individual laws and treaties China and Russia want the UN to become a governing body over the internet. I think this is a very interesting idea, however with the two countries that are pushing this change it also has cause for concern. Both of these countries really work to control the access of information for their respective peoples. A treaty at this level may make it more difficult for individual country’s industries really impact laws relating to the internet and freedom. I am going to be watching this very carefully.

As users we need to be aware of these sorts of developments and make sure that we are active in protecting the thing we all love and use on a regular basis. The internet.

Crowd Source Legislation

Posted on by

Crowd sourcing, is a name for a group of people taking part in something from all over the place. One of the first initiatives like this is open source software, a more recent version is Crowd source funding for businesses. These started as initiatives to give micro loans in Africa and other developing countries. More recently, websites like Kickstarter have allowed everyday people to help get new ventures starting (I plan on writing more about this later).

So what’s the deal with the legislation? Well, essentially, this is building upon the momentum Reddit and other websites generated during the SOPA/PIPA protests. Members have decided to create something like an internet bill of rights. The idea is the create a better balance between content holders, private companies, governments and users. In China there’s a great deal of censorship and Google and Twitter have both announced censorship based on the location of the user. This type of censorship would have killed the Arab spring before it happened.

OK? but that’s not going to effect me in the US. Well, we don’t know that. Yes, we have provisions against free speech, but that’s against governments censoring speech. It’s difficult to know what a private company will censor when this speech is in a quasipublic/private space. Facebook routinely censors groups and speech on their site. Additionally, look at what’s happening with MegaUpload.com and their users. There was legitimate use on the website and the Department of Justice doesn’t care. The EFF and the hosting company are working to find the legitimate data held on the site.

One of the goals of the act would be to reduce the ability of sites to censor speech. It’s clear that this is an important goal of the act. Additionally, there are programs, like TOR, that have been developed to allow people behind censorship to circumvent it (See my post about how TOR works). However, there could be penalties for people that use TOR in the US to help people circumvent the censorship. These types of ideas are what the goal of FIA is.

If you’re interested in taking your anger at SOPA/PIPA into a new direction and potentially become more involved in our government check it out here: http://www.reddit.com/r/fia/

But that’s US based stuff. Yes, sure it is. It seems like most of the users interested are from the US. Many of the users involved would like to see this become a treaty instead of just a law. In that case involvement from many different countries would be ideal and requested. Additionally, there is no reason why this type of legislation should be restricted to the US. These ideas are universal.

Continued fall out from MegaUpload arrests

Posted on by

A few days ago I discussed some of the actions taken by the hacker community and the impression that the MegaUpload arrests were related to SOPA. After some time we see that this arrest didn’t happen over night, you could argue the announcement and the timing was done poorly. However, I think that we should be paying attention to the ramifications of these arrests. Torrent Freak is reporting that there has been a massive response from the Cyberlocker companies. These cyberlockers were similar to MegaUpload in that a user would be able to upload a song and then anyone would be able to download it or stream the video. Now these companies are removing the search capabilities from their website and are restricting users to only their files.

While, what MegaUpload may have done may be illegal, the impact of the arrests is a foretelling of the impact of a law like SOPA. Internet companies argued that SOPA would be a job killing bill that it would kill innovation and break the internet. I think that this action clearly demonstrations that they are correct. For instance, Torrent Freak mentioned that several companies are shutting their doors and others are changing their services. Since it’s space based service, it is likely that each of these companies only has a few employees. However, they make a good chunk of change. MegaUpload was making several million and their competitors were likely making millions a month.

All of that money is going to be gone by next billing cycle. Not a single one of those companies where users were paying a premium will pay them another dime. Ad revenue will dry up, MegaUpload made almost a million alone since 2007 on ads. All of this money was getting put back into the economy through the purchase of servers, software and other equipment. It allows employees to buy stuff and was making a positive contribution to the economy.

From the different companies there was obviously innovation occurring. MegaUpload never allowed duplicates on its servers and when a duplicate was uploaded it would find another version of it and supply the link to the end user. Infringing content would just have the link removed, not the actual content. This would make searching for the real version difficult for copyright holders as it would be a game of wack the mole where the content would appear here, then with another link and so forth.

What other solutions could have been reached? I think there’s plenty of space here for further innovation for a business model. As users are using sites like this for personal storage and for video streaming, users are paying for content as well as clicking and viewing ads. Clearly there should be a way for the content owners to make money off of it as well. However, I have yet to read an article or a comment about the content industry approaching any of these companies, other than through DMCA, about working to pay some sort of royalty or set up a license agreement.

I think that a way to bring the balance back from the power being exclusively in the hands of the RIAA and MPAA (I’m just going to type RIAA from here on out), companies like Pandora.com, Spotify, Last.FM, MegaUpload (or any of its competitors), Google/YouTube, Vemeo and anyone else that uses licensed content should form their own consortium. Let’s just call it Content Users and Managers of America or CUMA for sure (I couldn’t think of anything really witty there (it doesn’t have to be just of America)). CUMA would provide a counter balance to the RIAA in that it provides equal footing and a way to combine the might of the end users. There are demands for these products, but the products simply do not demand the price premium they used to demand. Since these products aren’t able to demand the premium and the RIAA thinks that it should, they are overcharging as there are freely available alternatives which people flock to. Essentially, the RIAA needs to realize that for the websites allowing people to access the are getting paid pennies (if that) for a single view on a website. So for most sites, they can make more money if they don’t pay licensing fees. Lowering licensing fees is something that CUMA would be able to work for, to put it inline with expected ad revenue. This would allow for broader innovation in the market and reduced piracy.

It’s obvious from the amount of money that MegaUpload made that people are willing to pay to be able to watch as much content as they can when they want it. I feel like a broken record here (ha HA!), but people are willing to pay for content if it’s easily accessible.

I expect additional fall out from this. If SOPA or some similar style bill ever passes, expect this type of reaction to occur in other segments of the online industry. Online content is one of the places with a great deal of innovation and killing it would be a shame when there are possible solutions to this problem without resorting to industrial policy making and picking winners.

Update: I just saw this article Looks like MegaUpload has figured out a way to allow musicians to make money off of free downloads for original works through their site. This is some seriously awesome innovation.

The Government Strikes Back

Posted on by

The internet had thought it won a great victory with the black out of some seriously major websites, however it was a short lived victory as the Fed and its allies the vicious RIAA and MPAA have regrouped and launched a stunning counter attack destroying a rebel outpost on Hoth… errr Actually, The US government has shut down MegaUpload.com and arrested several employees for copyright infringement. You may remember MegaUpload for recently being involved in a dispute with Universal over a YouTube video. Where Universal issued false DMCA take down notices which required YouTube to take down the video. However, this video wasn’t infringing and MegaUpload sued Universal for the false claims. The interesting thing about this video is that it’s about all the legal ways you can use MegaUpload. The video is essentially an attempt by the company to show that there are legitimate uses for their services which, I’m assuming, was an attempt to get them into the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

To me, this action really shows that the US government doesn’t need SOPA to pass for it to censor the internet. It already has the ability to do so. SOPA would just put a rubber stamp approval on the actions that the government is already taking. This should be a wake up call. Yes, we had one with the joke of hearings for SOPA previously, however this is a slap in the face of the internet. It’s basically saying, sure we heard you, but you know what? you don’t matter.

Sure it might not be as easy as it would have been with SOPA passing and it’s not breaking the internet the way that SOPA would, but it’s still happening. As much as I hate Maddox, he’s right in his post about SOPA. We really have been pretty complacent, myself included. Yes, I’ve written a bunch, signed petitions and emailed my senators and congressmen multiple times, but big deal. Right now this is a hot button topic, but this isn’t going to go away. No one spoke up about the NDAA because it didn’t impact your ability to read Reddit or surf wikipedia. That law is as bad or worse than SOPA depending on what you think of freedom and civil liberties.

When I got home last night and saw that MegaUpload had been shut down, I was miserable. It made me feel completely impotent. That I was unable to impact the way the US government acts in any meaningful way. At this point, I’m not really sure what to do about this. If any other government would be doing this the US would be up in arms (perhaps literally) and would put a stop to it. Our government is doing this in our name and it’s horribly depressing that I can’t do anything to stop it.

Maddox is right. SOPA only failed because we were paying attention and we were able to get the tech giants behind us on it. SOPA will rear its ugly head again and we might be sleeping. The empire has struck back and we need to decide what we are going to do about it. Are we going to get some ewoks and take it down or are we going to keep signing petitions?

Anonymous has decided to fight back and has launched a large number of attacks on internet websites. As citizens that are deeply concerned with the MegaUpload action we need to ask ourselves, is this an appropriate response? Is this a way of protesting and assembling in an online space? Should anonymous be locked up for doing this? I think that this is a type of protest. Anonymous is as frustrated as I am and have decided to do something in response. It’s obvious that they felt like this is a direct attack on the internet in response to the SOPA protests and the “abuse of power” the internet displayed in taking down websites to protest SOPA.

It also begs the question, what will these website attacks actually accomplish?

What are some of your thoughts on this?

Update 1: I just saw that some 9,000 Hackers have joined Anonymous

Update 2: Apparently Anonymous is using a link that directs users to a Low Orbit Ion Canon DDoS tool that uses the users computer to attack a website. This is an interesting tactic as it will make it very difficult for agents to determine who was malicious and those that were  ignorant of what they were doing. Thus making the tool a more effective protest tool. It will be interesting to see what the ramifications of this new tactic are. I think it will be used again in the future and will make it as “easy” as signing a petition to join a DDoS without having to do the hard work of setting up the LOIC on your computer. Interesting.