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Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Frontier Foundation’

How US Government Spies Use Facebook

The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. It also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.

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Highlights from the deck include:

• On “getting info from Facebook” – options include photos, contact info, group contact info and IP logs. “HOWEVER, Facebook has other data available.” The deck notes that Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests.”
• MySpace and Twitter, on the other hand, are described differently. MySpace “requires a search warrant for private messages/bulletins less than 181 days old.” Twitter “will not preserve data without legal process,” has a “stated policy of producing data only in response to legal process” and has no Law Enforcement Guide (or spying manual, as some parties call such documents). Wouldn’t you like your social network to say no before it says yes and require a warrant before handing over information to law enforcement? We reached out to Facebook this evening about the government claim that it was unusually co-operative but have not yet received a response.
• Funny: As social networks go, LinkedIn’s “use for criminal communications appears limited” the document says. You don’t say. LinkedIn can be useful in finding expert witnesses, however.
• “Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc?” the document asks. Three reasons are offered: 1. Communicate with suspects/targets. 2. Gain access to non-public info. 3. Map social relationships/networks.
• “If agents violate terms of service,” the document asks, “is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” No answer is offered in the text.
• “Many witnesses have social-networking pages,” the presentation notes. Those pages can be a “valuable source of info on defense witnesses” and “potential pitfalls for government witnesses.”
• Also funny: DoJ prosectors are urged to “use caution in ‘friending’ judges, defense counsel.”

We expect the Electronic Frontier Foundation to offer further analysis in coming days. You can download a PDF of the document yourself here. For further discussion of these documents, see blog posts clustered on Techmeme.

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How The EFF Lost Its Way By Defending Hate Mongers And Tunnel Rats

Free speech is a basic human right and is essential to creativity and innovation.  But every society places limits on this, particularly when it transgresses into “hate speech” – which disparages someone or some group on the basis of race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and so on.  Calls to violence are tolerated even less.  These often lead to jail terms.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been the tech world’s champion of free speech since its inception in 1990.  I have always admired this group for defending the oppressed.  But when organizations achieve too much success, they often develop a sense of confidence and arrogance that, when unchecked, leads to their downfall.  They begin to believe they can “do no evil”.  A recent statement by the EFF makes me wonder whether it has reached this stage and needs to have its “Google China” moment. Michael Arrington wrote in 2007 that the “EFF may be getting a tad overzealous in its desire to defend our right to violate copyright and other intellectual property laws, and needs to take a step back and consider if the oppressed are now becoming the oppressor”.  I’m beginning to believe that Michael was right.

Let me explain the background of a case which the EFF has just passed judgment on so that you can decide for yourself whether this is indeed the situation.

The anti-immigrant groups and xenophobes I’ve written a lot about see the H-1B visa issue as the beachhead in their battle against skilled immigrants.  Nearly all foreign skilled professionals (such as engineers, scientists, and doctors) need this visa to work in the U.S.  As with the tax system, Medicare, and the big bailout, the H-1B visa program has its flaws and is occasionally abused.  You don’t see much visa fraud in Silicon Valley, because skills and competence are the only things that matter.  But for grunt-type IT work, cost is a bigger factor.  Most large service companies are highly ethical and go by the book. There are, however, a few shoddy body shops that bring in low-skilled workers and pay them below market wages.  These are a small minority.  Nevertheless, they make an easy target.

One of the most vocal members of the anti-immigration alliance is a computer programmer who calls himself “Tunnel Rat” (he doesn’t have the courage to reveal his real name).  He maintains several websites (ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com) that focus on attacking Indians, Hindus, and H-1B workers, whom he calls “curry-scented slumdogs”.  His websites are laced with racial slurs and profanity in English and Hindi and openly advocate hatred and violence.

Here are some examples from these websites.

Immediately after the massacre at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last November, which left 13 people dead and 29 wounded, Tunnel Rat put up a blog post that tried to link the killings to the H-1B program.  It said:

“American tech professionals have been forced to cower to the Indu-Invaders in I.T. because if they stood up for themselves, they would be labeled racists.  And thus, like the Feds, they said nothing, even as they were training their slumdog replacements and packing their boxes”.

A few days later, a gunman shot six people in Orlando, Florida.  According to CNN, Jason Rodriguez had worked for a year at RS&H, a facilities and infrastructure consulting firm, as an entry-level engineer before he was put on several months of probation and fired for “performance issues”.  Then he worked at Subway for two years before losing his sanity.  Kim Berry, President of a group called the Programmer’s Guild (which claims to represent the technical and professional workers of America, and which, according to Wikipedia, had 400 members at what was presumably its peak in 1999), posted on a blog suggesting that the murders might not have happened if RS&H (which has 800 employees) had not applied for six H-1B visa slots in 2007 and 11 in 2008.

Tunnel Rat piled on:

“It is my belief that Rodriquez was pushed aside to make room for an H-1B…  I predict that this is just the beginning of a massive wave of violence as middle-aged American men reach their breaking point and start to settle scores.  … H-1B program is now a national security issue.  We can’t have an invasion of curry-scented pod-people displacing millions of Americans”.

All of this is bizarre, despicable and disgusting, but other than the racial slurs, may not cross any lines. It is still free speech. Here is a posting from Tunnel Rat that does cross the line:

Now that the slumdogs have taken over Google, I can no longer trust them to protect my anonymity…  That is why I am protecting myself and my family by stockpiling weapons and ammo…  My greatest hope is that some techie goes crazy and acts out violently against his slumdog replacement and the collaborators that hired the feral jackal.  That techie in Pittsburgh was way off the mark by going after women at a gym.  If he was going to kill himself anyway, he should of stopped off at the nearby law offices of Cohen & Grigsby.

[Cohen & Grigsby has been in the news for a talk one of its lawyers gave on how to work the H-1B system].

In another post he responds to an Indian concerned about his racist remarks: “You should be concerned about THIS [link to article about violent attacks against Indians in Australia].” Tunnel Rat also gloated about having emailed the person “pictures of dead Indians and other nasty things” and said:

Here’s a deal, SLUMDOGS.  Get rid of Vineet Nayar, “the highly respected CEO of HCL Technologies” and I will stop blogging.  Here’s a picture, so you can identify the FAT FUCK…  Go ahead, eliminate that fucker.  I promise I WILL STOP BLOGGING…  The ball is in your court.

I can cite many more examples of threats of violence and “retribution”, but I am sure you get the idea.

One of the companies maligned, Apex Technology Group, filed suit against these sites.  In late December, a New Jersey court ruled in favor of Apex and ordered the sites to shut down, although allowing them enough time to file an appeal.

After the decision, the EFF put up a blog post criticizing the takedown order and claiming that the “… order dangerously overreaches.  By restricting access to entire websites, it places a prior restraint on all of the speech on the websites, even if that speech is unrelated to Apex”. EFF argued that this would be like “a court shutting Amazon.com or Yelp.com because of a disparaging review of a single product”.  I’m not sure whether this is a good analogy.  In my mind, those sites clearly cross the line from protected speech into terroristic threats or harassment.  A better analogy would be a Jihadi site posting hateful propaganda and calls to violence.  These sites use the same techniques: posting misleading information and hateful rants and suggesting that readers do something to right the alleged wrongs.

So I e-mailed the author of the EFF blog post, Kurt Opsdahl, a senior staff attorney at EFF, to ask him what gives.  I asked what if the site EFF had been defending were attacking African-Americans or Jews: would EFF be taking the same stand?  What if the site had been advocating a holocaust or calling people “niggers” instead of “slumdogs”: would this cross the line?  I also told him that I had received death threats traced back to the domain names in question via email and in the reader feedback section of BusinessWeek in articles I had written about immigration.

Kurt would not respond to the substance of what I asked.  The jist of his response: “A court order should not shut down any website unless the entirety was not protected speech.  While a ‘true threat’ is not protected speech, there are many views which are protected, even if repugnant”.

What shocked me about Kurt’s response was this comment: “I have not read the sites, since they were offline before this matter came to our attention”.  I find this absolutely unbelievable. Doesn’t the EFF know how to search the Google cache?  Doesn’t it have a responsibility to ensure that it is using its power effectively and wisely?

What sort of “power” does the EFF have exactly?  Right after its blog post, ComputerWorld’s Patrick Thibodeau wrote this article condemning the judge’s decision, which, like the EFF statement, didn’t even mention the nature of the speech on the site ordered to be shut down. (Patrick has been a vocal opponent of H-1B visas, something else he does not disclose in his coverage).  Likewise, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Oakland Journal posted articles holding up the EFF blog post as a shining beacon of justice.  The favorable media coverage became a major victory not only for opponents of H-1B visas but also for the general white supremacist, neo-Nazi, “kill all dark foreigners” crowd.  Nice company, EFF.  I’m sure you’ll get invited to the David Duke annual Christmas party soon.

You can debate the merits of the EFF stance from a legal standpoint.  But the EFF cannot function in a contextual vacuum.  I am certain its employees feel overworked and underpaid like those of many other non-profits.  But, by siding unwaveringly with some of the most hateful sites on the Internet and not even mentioning the nature of those sites, the EFF betrayed its charter of upholding justice.  A simple Google cache search would have easily shown Kurt and his colleagues that the sites in question were vitriolic.  By giving Tunnel Rat a free pass, the EFF encouraged several major media outlets to echo its one-sided defense of the ability to talk about killing and hurting Indians and H-1B holders.  If people want to have a debate about whether H-1B visas are good for America, let’s have it.  But if the most spirited response they can muster is to threaten the lives of their opponents, they’ve already lost the debate.

The only silver lining on this dark cloud is that it has brought this sort of xenophobia and racism out in the open. The anti-immigrant groups have claimed to be fighting a righteous battle for American workers.  Now it is clear what lies beneath the surface.  They can only fight with hate because logic escapes them.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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E-reader privacy policies compared: Big Kindle is watching you

It’s definitely shaping up to be the year of e-book readers: the Amazon Kindle is flying off (virtual) shelves, and we’d expect the Barnes & Noble Nook to start moving at a decent clip once the kinks get worked out. But any device with an always-on 3G connection to a central server raises some privacy questions, especially when it can broadcast granular, specific data about what you’re reading — data that’s subject to a wide spectrum of privacy laws and regulations when it comes to real books and libraries, but much less so in the digital realm. We’d say it’s going to take a while for all the privacy implications of e-books to be dealt with by formal policy, but in the meantime the best solution is to be informed — which is where this handy chart from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation comes in. As you’d expect, the more reading you do online, the more you can be tracked — and Google Books, the Kindle, and the Nook all log a ton of data that can be shared with law enforcement and various other third parties if required. Of course, we doubt the cops are too interested in your Twilight reading habits, but honestly, we’d rather users weren’t tracked at all. Check the full chart and more at the read link.

[Thanks, Tom]

E-reader privacy policies compared: Big Kindle is watching you originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yes Men punk US Chamber of Commerce on climate change, sued

In late October, a troupe of comedic pranksters called the Yes Men took on the United States Chamber of Commerce over its stance on climate change via a parody that was hard to distinguish from the real deal: a fake press conference, press releases, and a modified version of the Chamber’s own website, hosted at a similar address. The Chamber responded by getting the Yes Men’s ISP to pull the site, which drew the Electronic Frontier Foundation into the fight. Now, it looks like all these parties may be meeting in court, as the Chamber has filed a suit alleging that the parody crossed the line into fraud. We say “may” because the Chamber appears to be having a difficult time serving the pranksters.

The events started in April, when the Chamber triggered a series of events that could easily be considered self-parody. Its leadership filed a petition with the EPA, asking that the evidence for climate change be subjected to public hearings. After that petition was widely ignored, they upped the ante, calling for a modern equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which questioned the science behind evolution.

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Judge Dismisses Ridiculous Craigslist Prostitution Lawsuit, Plaintiff Mulls Appeal

Thomas Dart, the Illinois sheriff who took Craigslist to court over erotic advertisements that appeared on the popular classifieds site, is unhappy with this week’s decision of a federal judge to toss the lawsuit (full ruling embedded below).

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dart (pictured) said he was disappointed with the verdict and is now considering an appeal.

The legal battle Dart just lost was centered around Craigslist’s erotic services category (now dubbed Adult Services), which the Cook County sheriff alleged facilitated prostitution and constitutes a public nuisance.

Federal District Court Judge John F. Grady threw out the lawsuit, which was filed in July 2009 and got Dart a lot of attention, in its entirety.

The judge said that it was far from clear that Craigslist had actually encouraged its service to be used for advertising prostitutes, which was the core of Dart’s allegations. Grady added that Craiglist may even be able to claim protection under U.S. freedom of speech laws and the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes Internet intermediaries from civil liability for material posted by others.

Dart has now reportedly “vowed not to give up” and seems determined to waste more valuable time and resources on this ridiculous case.

We couldn’t have put it better than the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matt Zimmerman, who wrote:

Meritless cases brought by law enforcement officers, amounting to little more than publicity stunts with little to no chance of success, do little to address the officers’ underlying concerns.

You might remember how South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened similar legal action against Craigslist but ultimately got served nothing but humiliation when another federal judge blocked him from prosecuting Craigslist management, at least until he’s made a final decision on the case.

(Image via Huffington Post)

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New DHS laptop search policy: crap sandwich, fancier bread

Although the US has extensive legal protections for personal property and information, these only apply once you’re actually inside the country. As part of its role in protecting the nation’s borders, the US government has extensive leeway to search personal possessions with little in the way of what might be considered just cause. As personal possessions have gone digital, the Department of Homeland Security has targeted the devices and their data, and courts have ruled that agents have the right to seize laptops and examine the data on them.

The ability to arbitrarily seize personal electronic devices, from laptops to iPods, has concerned everyone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to a business travelers trade group, and prompted the introduction of a bill in Congress that would call on the DHS to clarify its rules. On Thursday, the DHS did precisely that, providing a set of standards for the handling of personal electronics and data. The new rules are unlikely to end the controversy, however, as they continue to leave major decisions up to the discretion of DHS employees.

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Is the iPhone Causing Apple to Lose the Plot?
Is Apple losing the plot? I ask this because, having just read this bollocks (Apple wants to make jailbreaking illegal because it supposedly threatens our nation’s cellphone tower infrastructure, and thereby threatens our national security), I’ve read nothing but well-reasoned, anti-Apple invective. Come, let’s explore the phenomenon.

But first: what’s going on? The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to make iPhone jailbreaking 100 percent legal. It’s your phone, so why can’t you install whatever the hell you want on it? No one tells you what software you can and cannot install on your PC, right? Exactly. Now, Apple doesn’t want jailbreaking to given any sort of legal blessing, because, well, Apple is Apple, and AT&T, its incompetent partner in crime, doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. Want to use Google Voice mobile? Oh, I bet you do, but The Man doesn’t want you to.

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