Did Grassroots Power Push FCC in Right Direction on Net Neutrality?

No, internet giants like Google and Facebook did. People with as much money than the telecom giants did it~jef.

 

Monday, February 02, 2015

by Common Dreams

Wheeler likely to support strict net neutrality protections after backing off from pro-industry initiatives

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

 

 

Following a months-long campaign by consumer advocacy groups that pushed for strict protection of the internet, Federal Communications Commissioner Tom Wheeler appears to be ready to introduce some of the strongest regulations possible on Thursday ahead of the FCC's final net neutrality vote on February 26, according to reports.

Those regulations include redefining broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act, a policy change that has been touted by internet watchdog groups as one of the most important net neutrality protections available.

Once a lobbyist for the cable and telecommunications industries, Wheeler initially supported lax regulations that critics said would open the door to controversial paid-prioritization policies, known as "fast lanes," allowing internet service providers to charge higher fees for speedier website loading times.

According to reporting by Politico on Monday, "interviews with FCC officials, industry executives and representatives of public interest groups reveal the origins of his dramatic pivot on this issue: an intense and relatively brief grass-roots lobbying campaign that targeted two people — him and President Barack Obama."

Pressure from digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press, which galvanized support from consumers and progressive media figures, saw Wheeler steadily backpedaling on his initiatives last year. His shift appeared near-complete after President Barack Obama spoke out in favor of strict net neutrality regulations on November 10.

Wheeler proposed in April new rules that would allow ISPs to create fast lane deals with internet companies as long as they were "commercially reasonable."

In response, a coalition of internet watchdogs and consumer advocacy groups launched a months-long series of campaigns against the chairman's proposals, while protesters camped out in front of FCC headquarters.

On June 1, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver ridiculed Wheeler and his proposed rules in a segment that quickly went viral, sending hundreds of thousands of consumers to the FCC website to comment in favor of stronger net neutrality regulations. Within months, four million emails and comments had come in, breaking FCC records.

Wheeler then moved towards a hybrid proposal that would impose Title II rules on parts of the internet, but not all of it. That, too, was met with disapproval by watchdogs and tech companies alike.

Meanwhile, Obama had also been under pressure from internet advocacy groups, who urged him to speak out in favor of stricter regulations. On November 10, he did just that, issuing a statement that called for using a Title II reclassification to safeguard the internet, "one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known."

Earlier this month, Wheeler indicated support for reclassification of the internet as a public utility under Title II, bringing praise from Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron who said, "Chairman Wheeler appears to have heard the demands of the millions of Internet users who have called for real net neutrality protections."

FCC Wants to Give Corporations Their Own Internet

And now the rights of corporate ownership officially supercede those of individual citizens. this isn't new, but the courts and the bureaucracy are going ahead and getting the big govt sellout locked in so we won't be able to repeal these inane conflicts of interest for a very long time or without extreme difficulty. Fuck corporate rule! Corporations aren't people. They should be dismantled every 20 years with the remaining holdings distributed among their workers, who may then apply for a brand new corporate charter, starting over from scratch every 20 years. It would help to prohibit the ridiculous amount of control a few corporate CEOs  and their executive boards have over our joke of a political process. Lobbying needs to be redefined with stricter limits, as well. And when you are interviewing for jobs in the public and private sector, you need to choose which one you'll stay in for 7 years. No more of this revolving door between regulating agencies and the industries/companies they regulate. It's all a huge shitsoaked conflict of interest that has destroyed a whole generation of workers, at least, and cannot provide any kind of future for the next generations of US citizens. The oligarchy must be destroyed by any means possible. Corporate leadership is far from patriotic: they hold the bulk of their fortunes in tax haven banks overseas to keep from paying taxes, drastically undercutting the federal budget during a crucial period in a failing economy 6 years deep in a "small d" depression, AND these traitors get to dictate policy and handpick their own candidates to do their bidding while holding office? Bullshit! Hang them all high! They betray everything sacred about this country and her consitution, all to make themselves richer at the expense of the nation and her people.

EAT THE RICH! and pile their bones up so high they reach the moon.--jef

++++++++++++++

The New Proposal Mocks Net Neutrality
by ALFREDO LOPEZ


When a federal court trashed its “net neutrality” compromise policy in January, the Federal Communications Commission assured us that the Internet we knew and depended on was safe. Most activists didn’t believe federal officials and this past week the FCC demonstrated how realistic our cynicism was.

The Commission announced last week that among its proposals on the Internet, due for full discussion on May 15, was one which would give access providers the right to sign special deals with content producers for connections that are faster and cleaner than the connections most websites use. It’s precisely the nightmare that court decision threatened.

In the predictable outcry and immediate debate over the FCC’s announcement, however, two major issues seemed to be lost.

To deliver this faster connection, the Internet giants will have to change the Net’s protocols, establishing a fast lane that completely destroys the technological basis of Internet neutrality. They will, effectively, be allowed to set up an alternate Internet.
At the same time, the announcements raise a question about the FCC’s role. To develop this proposal, it has obviously been talking to the very companies it is supposed to regulate and has written regulations based primarily on a concern about their ability to make lots of money.

Isn’t this the opposite of what federal regulation is supposed to do?

When the debate dust settles, it appears that not only may we lose the Internet as we know but we have no agency in government looking out for our interests.

The background has been covered on this website but, to recap:

Access (or service) providers offer connections to put you on the Internet and give you several speeds to choose from. They are mainly cable companies like Comcast and telecommunications companies like Verizon. Content providers use those connections to deliver what you want to see and read. Every website owner is a content provider, including biggies like Netflix.

Net Neutrality is the principle that service providers — like Verizon and Comcast — can’t discriminate in the delivery of content or provision of access based on user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication. If you go on-line, you can reach everything anyone else can. It was the law until this past January.

That was when a federal court struck down the provision finding that cable companies like Comcast weren’t subject to the neutrality rules that govern telephone companies and so net neutrality, based on the telecom industry’s practices, didn’t apply to high-speed providers. They are, after all, cable companies and anyone who subscribes to cable television with its multiple “programming packages” that give you a monthly dose of sticker shock knows there’s nothing “neutral” about cable.

In short, service provider companies can now charge content providers money to speed up their content delivery and the content providers can limit access to that faster content to people paying a higher price for it.

While the decision was based on cable company practice, it obviously benefits telecoms like Verizon who also offer high-speed service.

Apparently, the FCC wasn’t too unhappy either. Chairman Tom Wheeler (a former telecom industry lobbyist) reacted in stunningly triumphant terms, assuring us all that our access to the Internet will be completely protected. In fact, he said the ruling actually gives the FCC more regulatory power. This new proposal, carving out a slice of the Internet for rich corporations to operate more quickly and cleanly, was apparently what he meant.

In his defense of the current FCC plan, Wheeler explains that we would all still have access to everything on the Internet. The proposal, he explains, “will restore the concepts of net neutrality consistent with the court’s ruling in January.” But that January ruling threw Net Neutrality out the window and it’s clear that with this new proposal our access to certain content will be slower, more prone to start and stop “buffering” and less crisp than the faster connection unless we pay more for it.

It’s like the locksmith assuring us that our broken door lock will remain broken.

If that spasm of regulatory double-speak doesn’t provoke a groan, the argument by decision defenders will: they say that, while the companies will pay for the faster connection, no access provider will charge the consumer more for it.

But the content provider will. Obviously an outfit like Netflix is not going to offer this higher speed service that it is paying the access providers handsomely for to customers without charging them more for it. In fact, if past practice is any indication, even those of us who don’t or can’t pay for faster internet service we will all see our fees for watching this kind of on-line content rise, whether we’re watching it on the faster connection or not. Netflix pays Comcast more and charges the pass-along costs (with some profit mixed in): just the kind of hustle Net Neutrality was invented to prevent.

If the proposal is approved, as is expected, Net Neutrality will be buried. But the true threat to the Internet’s existence isn’t only the “pay for speed” proposal. To make this happen, providing companies will have to restructure their technology to allow for a faster “lane” on the Internet. There already are, of course, various speeds of “high-speed” service and that is maintained by the company’s determining which connecting server the customer is going to access. When you enter the Internet you are immediately connected to a server that handles outgoing and incoming traffic at a specific speed. If you pay for higher speeds, you get the higher-speed systems with their servers.

All of this, however, has up to now been handled at the user or customer level. The Internet itself remains the same. What the FCC is proposing is a new way of regulating speed. Now it is the content provider who is assigned a specific speed lane and any user who pays can access that high-speed content. To make this possible, the access provider will have to establish not a higher speed connection server but a completely separate connection to the Internet. This isn’t a faster lane on the highway; it’s a completely separate highway.

With that “alternate Internet” established, and with a small empire of developers continuously improving it, the power of providers to control all Internet content is now in place. They can start with Netflix, but they legally have power to channel any Internet content over that super-highway, leaving most content providers in the dust. That will certain include most websites your visit, including this one. As speed over the Internet improves with new technological development, guess where most of the development investment is going? As new streaming technology improves, content developers will have to pay to take advantage of it and most of us just don’t have that kind of money.

The impact is also international because the Internet has no national boundaries and the rules governing any U.S. based company apply to all its activities world-wide unless the government of a specific country objects. That objection will rarely happen because most governments won’t care or will take a pay-off (in the form of a tax payment or licensing fee) to shut up. In fact, governments all over the world can now treat this as another form of revenue.

This kind of corporate control over the Internet and our communications is frightening and control is what the corporations are seeking. It’s been the goal of every major company to control as much access as they can, growing their “user-base” and profits in the process. In fact, the prospect of a wide open internet has now attracted a couple of “data giants”: Google and Facebook. Each company is now developing technology to provide access to everyone on earth using signal bouncing balloons (in Google’s case) and drones and satellites (in Facebook’s). While both companies protest that their intentions are altruistic (providing Internet to all humans), the timing of their plans in light of this decision seem like the good old pursuit of profit.

Rhe main question isn’t whether these people will try to do this because that’s answered by their history: Of course they will. The question then is: What is the FCC doing about it?

This week, coalitions of Internet freedom activists were making plans to make their presentations before the FCC and to lobby Congress and to do letter-writing campaigns to just about any concerned person in government. All of this has proven to be important and useful work and it has ended in some successes in the past.

But why should any of us have to do this? Isn’t the very role of the FCC to protect and represent the public? While neo-con steroids that have been driving it for the last two decades, the FCC’s legal responsibilities remain the same: not to protect the interests of corporations but to protect our interests against corporations.

Clearly, with a proposal that represents corporate interests, the FCC isn’t doing any such thing. Some of us aren’t surprised; none of us should be.

Freedom = Censorship?

Saturday, July 14, 2012 by MediaCitizen

by Tim Karr

 

Think you have the right to speak freely via cellphones, websites and social media? Well, the companies that provide you with access to the Internet don’t.

The framers drafted the First Amendment as a check on government authority — not corporate power. But whether we’re texting friends, sharing photos on Facebook, or posting updates on Twitter, we’re connecting with each other and the Internet via privately controlled networks.

 And the owners of these networks are now twisting the intent of the First Amendment to claim the right to control everyone's online information.

Right before the Fourth of July, Verizon filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that expressed this intent in no uncertain terms. The brief was part of the telecom company’s bid to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, which prohibit carriers from blocking or discriminating against Internet users’ content.

In the brief, Verizon argues that the First Amendment gives the company the right to serve as the Internet’s editor-in-chief.

The First Amendment “protects those transmitting the speech of others, and those who ‘exercise editorial discretion’ in selecting which speech to transmit and how to transmit it,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “In performing these functions, broadband providers possess ‘editorial discretion.’ Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others.”

By “content” Verizon means all digital communications that cross its wires, from photographs of your cousin’s backyard barbeque to YouTube videos of human rights violations in Syria.

Verizon filed its brief quietly just before the July Fourth holiday, but it has caught the attention of the Internet freedom community like a skunk under the back porch.

This is not the first time Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have suggested that they have a First Amendment right to stifle speech online. AT&T argued in 2010 that its role is similar to that of an editor who selects content and speaks — and that it is not merely a conduit for the communications of others.

This defense of corporate censorship is no idle threat but a pretext for a full-scale takeover of the Internet — a move that first requires killing off any consumer protections that stand in the way.

We live in a time when growing numbers of people watch television programs, listen to music, create videos and share photographs via Internet connections provided by private entities.

A 2011 report from European Digital Rights states that ISPs and other technology companies are fast becoming the information cops of the world. The report paints a picture of an emerging “censorship ecosystem” fueled by private entities that often work hand in glove with governments.

This collusion serves both corporate and political interests. ISPs are seeking new authority to interfere with user traffic, including limiting access to the content of competitors like Netflix or shutting down the accounts of users they charge with sharing too much media. Governments are demanding that access providers help them filter and police the Internet — and that they do so under a veil of secrecy.

The most dangerous threats to free speech today lie at this intersection between corporate and political power. While businesses might do many things better than governments, our government is at least by definition directly accountable to the American people. So when Verizon claims the right to decide who gets free speech on the Internet, it’s making this claim as a benevolent despot, not as a representative democracy.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution could not have foreseen a time in which technology allowed more than a billion people to communicate via mobile phones connected to the World Wide Web. Nor could they have envisioned a world in which companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast wield more authority over our free speech than a British monarch.

And yet the First Amendment has survived to this day in defense of democracy’s most consequential right. People on both the left and right value freedom of speech. Just days after Verizon filed its brief, a diverse coalition of more than 1,000 groups and Internet dignitaries joined together behind a Declaration of Internet Freedom that establishes freedom of expression as its first principle.

But popular consensus behind free speech on the Internet is running headlong into media giants like Verizon that want to suppress open Internet culture.

Any claim that the First Amendment protects corporations — and not people — is absurd. And it shows just how far some companies are willing to go to control 21st century communications.

RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1

Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry's chief lobbyist.
by Greg Sandoval March 14, 2012, CNET

NEW YORK--The country's largest Internet service providers haven't given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops.

Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.

But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers in New York today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 1.

Supporters say this could become the most effective antipiracy program ever. Since ISPs are the Internet's gatekeepers, the theory is that network providers are in the best position to fight illegal file sharing. CNET broke the news last June that the RIAA and counterparts at the trade group for the big film studios, had managed to get the deal through--with the help of the White House.

Sherman told attendees of the Association of American Publishers' annual meeting that planners had always said that setting up an antipiracy program like this could take a year. He told CNET following his panel that the process isn't as easy as turning on a switch.

"Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."

The program, commonly referred to as "graduated response," requires that ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, the ISP is then asked to send out "confirmation notices" asking that they confirm they have received notice.

At that time, the accused customers will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don't stop pirating material. If the customer is flagged for pirating again, the ISP can then ratchet up the pressure. Participating ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls "mitigation measures," which include throttling down the customer's connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating.

The ISPs can waive the mitigation measure if they choose and not one of the service providers has agreed to permanently terminate service.

The partnership with the major bandwidth providers was years in the making and the deal pumped lots of confidence into the entertainment sector. After the White House and state and federal lawmakers showed support for the deal, leaders at the RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) believed they had the momentum to get antipiracy legislation passed in Congress.

They were wrong of course. The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act were run off the rails mostly by the tech sector. It will be interesting to see how the tech sector reacts once accused Internet pirates begin having their Web access suspended.

Watching Over You

The Perils of Deep Packet Inspection

by ANTOINE CHAMPAGNE

When The Wall Street Journal reporter Margaret Coker visited the Libyan government’s surveillance centre in Tripoli after the city’s fall, she saw that the authorities had been monitoring everything: the internet, mobile phones, satellite phone and internet connections. Some files included emails and online conversations between Gaddafi’s opponents. Notices on the walls revealed that the company which had installed the equipment was Amesys, a subsidiary of French firm Bull (1). The French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé later reported that France’s military intelligence directorate had been solicited to help train Libya’s internal spies (2).

In Syria, US equipment helps Bashar al-Assad’s regime censor the internet, and retrieve logins and passwords to access people’s emails or Facebook and Twitter pages. This tool is particularly useful for tracking the communications of opponents with internal or foreign connections.

The technology is innocuously named “deep packet inspection” (DPI). When someone sends an email, a series of servers relays it to its destination. Each server sends the message on to the next, looking only at the recipient’s address, and not at the contents. An expert on internet law, Jonathan Zittrain, explained: “It’s a bit like being at a party with polite friends. If you’re too far from the bar, or there are too many people in the way, you ask the person next to you to get you a beer. They ask the person next to them, who is a bit closer to the bar, and so on. Eventually your order reaches the bar and your beer arrives via the same route back. Since everyone is polite, no one will have drunk your beer along the way.”

But DPI is less polite. How would you feel if the person next to you analysed your order, and started lecturing you about it? Or if they tampered with your drink, adding water or something stronger? This is exactly what DPI technology can do: it allows people to read the content of internet traffic, modify it, and even send it to someone else.

Amesys is not alone in this market. US press agency Bloomberg recently reported that another French company, Qosmos, had provided DPI technology to a consortium equipping Syria to the same standard as Gaddafi’s Libya (3). DPI is also at the heart of China’s firewall, which allows the government to censor internet traffic and spy on its citizens.

‘Secret new industry’
The recent Wikileaks publication of numerous internal documents from these companies shows that monitoring communication networks is “a secret new industry spanning 25 countries … In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last 10 years systems of indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm” (4). A little earlier The Wall Street Journal had published more than 200 marketing documents from 36 companies offering the US anti-terrorist agency various surveillance and computer hacking tools (5).

DPI entered the spotlight in May 2006 when Mark Klein, a former technician with US internet provider AT&T, leaked the fact that the company had installed DPI technology at the heart of the county’s internet network, in cooperation with the US National Security Agency (which invented the Echelon system in the 1980s and 1990s). The technology was provided by internet surveillance company Narus (slogan “See Clearly, Act Swiftly”). Narus was set up in 1997, has 150 employees, earned $30m in 2006, and was bought up by Boeing in 2010. The Mubarak regime was reported to have installed Narus equipment in Egypt (6).

The flow of information over the internet includes the web, emails, synchronous exchanges (instant messaging) and asynchronous exchanges (blogs, discussion forums), phone conversations, video, raw data, etc. Most of this communication is not encrypted, so it is easy for both the casual hacker and state security services to monitor it.

Constraints or profits?
But some private companies are also seeing a financial advantage in this technology. Telecoms operators such as Free, SFR and Orange have started to complain that large amounts of information are being conveyed on their networks without the producer paying. Internet service providers (ISPs) are not happy about paying to transmit YouTube videos, which they are obliged to provide to their subscribers. So they came up with the idea of charging a supplement to the information’s producer or its final user, or slowing down some traffic in favour of others. But to do that they have to be able to measure precisely what is passing through their networks.

In the same way, mobile phone operators have tried to limit their infrastructure costs by restricting their customers’ access to the internet. So they prohibit smart phone users from peer-to-peer file sharing, or using vocal or video communication like Skype.

Here too, DPI allows them to monitor and manage the traffic, and allocate higher bandwidths to certain services, such as those they provide. This contradicts the notion of “network neutrality”, whereby service providers are meant to convey all requested information without discrimination.

When DPI is applied to web browsing, it can record every move a person makes online. Marketing professionals are desperate to exploit such information. Orange recently launched Orange Shots, which uses DPI technology to analyse the websites a subscriber uses (with their consent), in order to offer them ultra-targeted products. That could make ISPs as profitable as Facebook and Google, as long as these programmes attracted subscribers; it would be enough to claim that the data was anonymous to make it a perfectly marketable product.

The curious reader could check the Data Privacy page on the website of GFK, an international market research group and Qosmos shareholder: while it casually mentions web “cookies”, it fails to explain that it also tracks visitors to websites using a DPI technology which is supposedly anonymous because GFK alone knows the formula. GFK is present in more than 150 countries.

DPI is also attracting intellectual property rights and copyright holders who are trying to fight “illegal” file sharing on peer-to-peer networks (BitTorrent), or sites for uploading and downloading files directly, like Megaupload. Knowing exactly who is trying to download what film or music file, and blocking that person’s access, can only be done with “deep” surveillance infrastructure shared across all the data exchange points that the ISPs represent.

Legal surveillance
Another natural market for DPI technology is legal surveillance. In France police sometimes monitor a suspect’s communications as part of a judicial investigation, authorised by a judge and the National Committee for the Control of Security Interceptions. But this is a niche market, concerning a very small proportion of the population. Unless they were counting on another huge rise in the anti-terrorist budget, it would make sense for businesses in this sector to look for other commercial outlets.

That is where the governments of police states, which want to listen to their entire populations, come in. Surveillance software can be tested in these countries under real conditions. That is why Ben Ali’s Tunisia received a discount on systems that still had bugs. Libya provided Amesys with a real life experiment of what Eagle software could or could not do. Alcatel is doing the same in Burma. The information gathered by DPI inevitably leads to arrests. (Torture, using tried and tested methods, can do the rest.)

Puzzled, no doubt, by the high number of European companies in this sector, the European parliament has passed a resolution to ban the sale abroad of systems monitoring phone calls and text messages, or providing targeted internet surveillance, if this information is used to violate democratic principles, human rights or freedom of expression. On 1 December 2011 the EU Council tightened restrictions on Syria and banned “exports of equipment and software intended for use in the monitoring of internet and telephone communications by the Syrian regime”.

Despite this, there is little legal control over the global export of surveillance equipment. Manufacturers find it easy to slip through the net (especially since there is such a diversity of legislation), governments do not publish their permits, and this type of software is not strictly considered a weapon.

Notes.1) Paul Sonne and Margaret Coker, “Firms Aided Libyan Spies”, The Wall Street Journal, New York, 30 August 2011.
(2) “Des experts des services secrets francais ont aidé Kadhafi à espionner les Libyens” and “Secret militaire sur le soutien à Kadhafi”, Le Canard Enchainé, Paris, 7 September and 12 October 2011.
(3) “Syria Crackdown Gets Italy Firm’s Aid with US-Europe Spy Gear”, Bloomberg, 3 November 2011.
(4) WikiLeaks, “The Spy Files”, 1 December 2011.
(5) Agreement between France’s education minister Jack Lang and Max Cloupet, representing Catholic schools under contract to the state, 15 June 1992.
(6) Timothy Karr, “One US Corporation’s Role in Egypt’s Brutal Crackdown”, The Huffington Post,28 January 2011.

How to Use the Internet in Stealth Mode

The Key to Staying Private When Big Brother is Watching

Kyle Gonzales | International Man

February 16, 2012

“For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders - every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.”This was from the opening paragraph of a Brookings Institution report (PDF).

Does that send chills up your spine? If so, don’t read the rest of this article: you might not touch your computer for a week.

As I discussed in the case for e-mail diversification, planting your electronic flag is certainly an important part of the “online privacy equation”, as it gets the storage and routing of your e-mail messages out of jurisdictions which are not respectful of your privacy.

However, there are additional concerns that you should be worried about.

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the western world are required by law to track nearly everything you do online. While the US government has been trying to hide their electronic wiretapping program as a state secret, the EU made theirs public by passing the Data Retention Directive of 2006. Article 5, under “Categories of data to be retained”, lists the gory details of what is tracked. This is required for home phones, mobile phones, Internet telephony and e-mail. And depending on the country, this information will be kept for 6 months to 2 YEARS.

Under the Data Retention Directive, here is what is being tracked in every e-mail sent:

• Your name and address
• The name and address of everyone you send e-mail to
• The time and date you logged on and off of your Internet service, along with your IP address and username
• The time and date you sent your e-mail
• Your computer’s operating system, hardware, and other identifying information

Other EU countries are taking electronic surveillance even further. Denmark, for instance, passed a law in 2007 tracking all Internet access, not just e-mail and VoIP calls. And Sweden, while delaying implementation of the Data Retention Directive, passed a law in 2008 to record all Internet and phone communications which cross their borders.

Forget about authoritarian governments, "democratically" (s)elected ones are tracking your every move online.

So how do you gain some manner of privacy in this environment?

By creating your own private network across the Internet.

How to make the Internet your own private network

A virtual private network (VPN) allows users to access private networks (like the corporate network of your employer) by creating an encrypted “tunnel” across the Internet between the user’s computer and the private network. The encryption ensures that any information shared between the user and the private network is kept safe from prying eyes. It is similar to the encryption between a secure website and your web browser, except it protects all the traffic sent over that network (including things like e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype) and not just web traffic.

A number of service providers are taking this to the next level. They allow users to connect to their networks via a VPN “tunnel”, then access the Internet through their private network.

How does this give you more privacy?

Over your regular ISP network, all of your traffic is being monitored. The ISP can see what sites you are connecting to, who your e-mail provider is, what chat services you are using, and so forth. When you enable your VPN “tunnel” to access the Internet, the only thing your ISP can see is your connection to your VPN service provider, not anything else. (Your connection to the VPN service provider is highly encrypted, so your ISP cannot see what is happening “inside” the tunnel.)

A VPN also provides protection when using unencrypted “free Wifi” networks that you may use at coffee shops and airports while traveling. It is much easier than people expect for hackers to break into these networks and steal your usernames and passwords. But if you are using your VPN “tunnel” to access the Internet, hackers will not be able to see where you are going online, and all of your information will be protected. Also, most Internet sites and services you connect to are monitoring your connections to their servers.

Google, for instance, records the IP address with every search you make in their search engine. Most websites also record the IP address of your computer when you browse their web pages. Chat networks, e-mail providers, all record the IP addresses of those who are accessing their network. When your Internet connections pass through the provider’s network, these sites will not see your computer’s IP address. Instead, it will only see your VPN service provider’s address. Many times, this IP address will even be in a different country from your own!

So, by using a VPN, your Internet Service Provider cannot track where you are going (other than seeing you connect your VPN), and remote services like Google, Amazon or whatever do not know where you are coming from.

An interesting side benefit: some VPN providers let you choose the country from which websites will think you’re visiting from.

How is this useful?

Well, let’s say you’re an international traveler who is also a Hulu addict. You are in a location where Hulu has yet to negotiate viewing rights (e.g. Canada). So you fire up your VPN and choose to have your traffic appear as if it’s coming from a computer in the USA. Voila! Now you can watch recent US-based TV shows on Hulu through your VPN connection in whatever far off land you may find yourself in.

Not all VPN providers are created equally

For those less interested in Internet entertainment and more interested in privacy, we should discuss different aspects of VPN providers that differentiate them from each other…

• As discussed in my last article about how the US Patriot Act affects people in other jurisdictions, it is important that your VPN provider is not located within the US or be owned by a US company. While you might gain protection from hackers sniffing traffic at a coffee shop, the US government could still access your information as it transits your US-based VPN provider’s network.
• An “anonymous proxy” is not the same as a VPN. Most anonymous proxies provide privacy for web browsing only. A proper VPN service will provide privacy for ALL of your Internet traffic, including Operating System updates, VoIP calls, chat networks, and other non-web traffic.
• Some VPN providers are focused on allowing you to choose your own “exit point” (where your traffic appears to be coming from) while others are focused on mixing and “anonymizing” your traffic within their networks to provide the highest levels of privacy. While having a VPN is better than no VPN, you often have to make a decision between convenience and privacy.

Next steps

Start investigating what other international travelers and privacy-inclined individuals are using for their VPN services. Find out what their primary needs were and how their chosen VPN service “scratched their itch”.

Will Google, Amazon, and Facebook Black Out the Net?

By Alec Liu | FoxNews.com
Published December 30, 2011

In the growing battle for the future of the Web, some of the biggest sites online -- Google, Facebook, and other tech stalwarts -- are considering a coordinated blackout of their sites, some of the web’s most popular destinations.

No Google searches. No Facebook updates. No Tweets. No Amazon.com shopping. Nothing. 

The action would be a dramatic response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill backed by the motion picture and recording industries that is intended to eliminate theft online once and for all. HR 3261 would require ISPs to block access to sites that infringe on copyrights -- but how exactly it does that has many up in arms. The creators of some of the web's biggest sites argue it could instead dramatically restrict law-abiding U.S. companies -- and reshape the web as we know it.

A blackout would be drastic. And though the details of exactly how it would work are unclear, it's already under consideration, according to Markham Erickson, the executive director of NetCoalition, a trade association that includes the likes of Google, PayPal, Yahoo, and Twitter.

“Mozilla had a blackout day and Wikipedia has talked about something similar,” Erickson told FoxNews.com, calling this kind of operation unprecedented. 

"A number of companies have had discussions about that," he said.

With the Senate debating the SOPA legislation at the end of January, it looks as if the tech industry’s top dogs are finally adding bite to their bark, something CNET called "the nuclear option."

"When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA,” Declan McCullagh wrote, “you’ll know they’re finally serious.”

“This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position,” Erickson explained. “The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.”

The polarizing movement has many critics but also equally strong and diverse support, including most major media companies as well as businesses like 3M, Adidas, Burberry, CVS and more. News Corp., the parent company of FoxNews.com, also supports the law.

"SOPA targets foreign websites that sell counterfeit drugs and stolen copies of Hollywood movies -- not such American Web sites as YouTube or your favorite blog," wrote Richard Bennett, senior research fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, in an editorial in the New York Post. 

The law is necessary to deal with those sites, he said.

"Internet criminals selling bogus drugs or pirated movies simply set up shop in China or a distant island republic, knowing that they won't be harassed by law enforcement regardless of how many U.S. lives or jobs they endanger."

But opposition to the legislation has grown substantially louder in recent weeks as the vote looms.

On November 15, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to Washington warning of SOPA's dangers. "We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation's cybersecurity," the letter argued

Google co-founder Sergey Brin himself has loudly denounced the bill. “While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don't believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world,” Brin wrote on Google+ social networking site earlier this month.

Others have taken a more proactive approach, voting with their dollars against those who support the bill.

GoDaddy.com, one of the largest domain registrars on the Internet, stands to potentially lose thousands of customers on Thursday, Dec. 29, or “Dump GoDaddy Day,” the culmination of an ongoing boycott of the company.

Microblogging site Tumblr generated 87,834 calls to Congress with its own anti-SOPA campaign -- a total of 1,293 total hours spent talking to representatives.

Hollywood and the recording industry have maintained the bill's necessity in the name of piracy. "Rogue Web sites that steal America's innovative and creative products attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs," the US Chamber of Commerce (a Republican SuperPAC) wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times.

But Erickson believes this is “just the tip of the iceberg in terms of response.” 

“People take the Internet very personally," Erickson told FoxNews.com. “It’s a very important part of their lives."

House panel approves bill forcing ISPs to log users’ web history

By Eric W. Dolan
RAW Story

The House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and retain records about Internet users' activity.

CNET reported the bill would require ISPs to retain customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses for 12 months.

The bill passed by a vote of 19 to 10, and is aimed at helping law enforcement track down pedophiles.

"The bill is mislabeled," Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), a senior member of the panel told CNET. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (H.R. 1981) was sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)

“When investigators develop leads that might result in saving a child or apprehending a pedophile, their efforts should not be frustrated because vital records were destroyed simply because there was no requirement to retain them," Smith said Thursday.

"This bill requires ISPs to retain subscriber records, similar to records retained by telephone companies, to aid law enforcement officials in their fight against child sexual exploitation."
The American Civil Liberties Union and 29 other organizations sent a letter (PDF) to Rep. Smith on July 27, claiming that "any data retention mandate is a direct assault on bedrock privacy principles."

"The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized," Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said.

"Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans' expressive activities is simply un-American. Such a scheme would be as objectionable to our Founders as the requiring of licenses for printing presses or the banning of anonymous pamphlets."

The bill is supported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Center for Victims of Crime, the National Sheriff’s Association, the Major County Sheriff’s Association, the International Union of Police Associations and the Fraternal Order of Police.

GB Court orders BT to block pirate links website

(It will happen here in the US soon, too. --jef)

+++++

28th July, 2011 by Henna Butt

A High Court judge has ruled that BT, Britain’s largest ISP must block access to Newzbin 2, a website, which like many others provides links to pirated movies.

This is a landmark case in that an ISP has not previously been asked to block a website of this nature. This ruling will provide precedent for further action to be taken with different ISPs in order to block the vast numbers of similar websites that provide links to pirated material.

Justice Arnold stated: “In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin 2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes.”

The legal action was launched by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) who celebrated the ruling as a victory for people working in creative industries.

The digital rights organisation the Open Rights Group argued that the ruling could set a “dangerous” precedent, challenging the freedom and openness upon which the Internet has been built.

“There are serious risks of legitimate content being blocked and service slowdown. If the goal is boosting creators’ ability to make money from their work then we need to abandon these technologically naive measures, focus on genuine market reforms, and satisfy unmet consumer demand,” said ORG campaigner Peter Bradwell.

Once a ruling allows the blocking of a website then questions in future will arise over the conditions which make a site worthy of being blocked and it is this potential for ‘gagging’ that we must be wary of.

Net Neutrality Advocates Decry FCC 'False' Solution and 'Squandered Opportunity'

Statements by Free Press and ACLU
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

WASHINGTON - The media advocacy group Free Press released the following statement in response to actions by the FCC today:

By a 3-2 vote Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules intended to prevent Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from acting as gatekeepers on the Web. The rules, however, heavily favor the industry they are intended to regulate, and leave consumers with minimal protections. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps voted with Chairman Julius Genachowski, while Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker voted against.

Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron made the following statement:

“We are deeply disappointed that the chairman chose to ignore the overwhelming public support for real Net Neutrality, instead moving forward with industry-written rules that will for the first time in Internet history allow discrimination online. This proceeding was a squandered opportunity to enact clear, meaningful rules to safeguard the Internet’s level playing field and protect consumers.

“The new rules are riddled with loopholes, evidence that the chairman sought approval from AT&T instead of listening to the millions of Americans who asked for real Net Neutrality. These rules don't do enough to stop the phone and cable companies from dividing the Internet into fast and slow lanes, and they fail to protect wireless users from discrimination. No longer can you get to the same Internet via your mobile device as you can via your laptop. The rules pave the way for AT&T to block your access to third-party applications and to require you to use its own preferred applications.

“Chairman Genachowski ignored President Obama's promise to the American people to take a 'back seat to no one' on Net Neutrality. He ignored the 2 million voices who petitioned for real Net Neutrality and the hundreds who came to public hearings across the country to ask him to protect the open Internet. And he ignored policymakers who urged him to protect consumers and maintain the Internet as a platform for innovation. It’s unfortunate that the only voices he chose to listen to were those coming from the very industry he’s charged with overseeing."

The American Civil Liberties Union released this statement:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today passed a new rule clarifying the legal authority of the FCC to enforce network neutrality principles. Network neutrality principles protect free speech online by prohibiting the owner of a network from prioritizing some content on the Internet while slowing other content.

The rule approved today by the FCC includes full network neutrality protections for the wired Internet, which includes cable and DSL service to homes and businesses, but provides lesser protections for wireless broadband service and may allow wireless broadband providers to block certain applications and services that compete with their own applications and services. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for network neutrality protections on both the wired and wireless Internet as important safeguards for free speech.

"Network neutrality principles are essential to protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans who rely on the Internet as a forum for free speech. While the new FCC rule creates stronger network neutrality protections for Americans who use the wired Internet, it fails to provide adequate protections for Americans who rely on wireless broadband service," said Chris Calabrese, ACLU Legislative Counsel. "By creating two sets of regulations – one for the wired Internet and one for wireless broadband – and failing to ground them in the strongest legal protections available, the FCC has failed to protect free speech and Internet openness for all users. The ACLU will continue to fight for full network neutrality protections. Internet openness is key to protecting our First Amendment rights."

The rule passed by the FCC today does not reclassify wireless broadband service as a telecommunications service, which the ACLU and other proponents of network neutrality have long urged. Treating broadband access as similar to phone service would have allowed the FCC to rely on its broader regulatory authority under Title II of the Communications Act to enforce network neutrality principles.

Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy

BY GLENN GREENWALD | MONDAY, AUG 2-5, 2010 Forbes' technology writer Andy Greenberg reports that at the Defcon Security Conference yesterday, an individual named Chet Uber appeared with revelations about the case of accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo.  These revelations are both remarkable in their own right and, more important, highlight some extremely significant, under-examined developments unrelated to that case.  This is a somewhat complex story and it raises even more complex issues, but it is extremely worthwhile to examine.

Uber is the Executive Director of a highly secretive group called Project Vigilant, which, as Greenberg writes, "monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers" and "hands much of that information to federal agencies."  More on that in a minute.  Uber revealed yesterday that Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning to the federal government for allegedly confessing to being the WikiLeaks leaker, was a "volunteer analyst" for Project Vigilant; that it was Uber who directed Lamo to federal authorities to inform on Manning by using his contacts to put Lamo in touch with the "highest level people in the government" at "three letter agencies"; and, according to a Wired report this morning, it was Uber who strongly pressured Lamo to inform by telling him (falsely) that he'd likely be arrested if he failed to turn over to federal agents everything he received from Manning.  

So, while Lamo has repeatedly denied (including in his interview with me) that he ever worked with federal authorities, it turns out that he was a "volunteer analyst" for an entity which collects private Internet data in order to process it and turn it over to the Federal Government.  That makes the whole Manning case all the more strange:  Manning not only abruptly contacted a disreputable hacker out of the blue and confessed to major crimes over the Interent, but the hacker he arbitrarily chose just happened to be an "analyst" for a group that monitors on a massive scale the private Internet activities of American citizens in order to inform on them to U.S. law enforcement agencies (on a side note, if you want to judge what Adrian Lamo is, watch him in this amazing BBCinterview; I've never seen someone behave quite like him on television before).

In terms of what they mean for the Manning case, those revelations require a lot more analysis, but I want to focus on the much more important aspect of these revelations:  namely, what Project Vigilant does as well as the booming private domestic espionage industry of which they are a part.  There's very little public information about this organization, but what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals.  From theForbes report:

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant's manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs).  Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can "develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address."

They're tracking 250 million IP addresses a day, compiling dossiers, and then turning them over to federal agencies -- with the ability to link that information to "any name."  As this June, 2010 article from the Examiner-- one of the very few ever written about the group -- put it:

Project Vigilant has been operating in near total secrecy for over a decade, monitoring potential domestic terrorist activity and tracking various criminal activities on the Web. In a series of exclusive interviews with some of the group's leaders, it's clear that the people doing this work are among the most sophisticated and experienced experts in today's rapidly moving world of Internet security.

In case you doubt the seriousness of this group, consider the list of its officials, which includes Mark Rasch, who headed the DOJ's Internet Crime Unit for 9 years; Kevin Manson, a retired Homeland Security official; George Johnson, who "develop[ed] secure tools for the exchange of sensitive information between federal agencies" for the Pentagon; Ira Winkler, a former NSA official; and Suzanne Gorman, former security chief of the New York Stock Exchange.  These are people with extensive, sophisticated expertise in compiling highly invasive data about individuals' Internet activities, and more so -- given their background -- how to package it in a way that can be used by federal agencies.

* * * * * 

Project Vigilant is but one manifestation of a booming and unaccountable industry:  groups which collect vast amounts of highly informative data about American citizens -- particularly their Internet activities -- and then sell it or otherwise furnish it to the U.S. Government.  A separate Examiner article described how Project Vigilant is funded by BBHC Global, a highly secretive "information security firm" -- see if you can find any information about it -- whose Managing Director, Steven Ruhe, drapes himself in the same creepy, vigilante-patriot language as the group which he funds:

In the fight against terror, the U.S needs all the help it can get, even if that assistance comes from unpaid volunteers.  For the past 14 years, a significant volunteer group of U.S. citizens has been operating in near total secrecy to monitor and report illegal or potentially harmful activity on the Web.

Flying "under the radar" and carefully discouraging any press coverage that focused on the group, Project Vigilant has quietly operated in the eddies and whirlpools of Internet research, feeding tips and warnings to federal, state and military agencies. The group claims over 500 current members, although their names and identities are still mostly secret.  Their members comprise some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field of information security today and include current employees of the U.S. government, law enforcement and the military. . . .

The group's collaboration with the U.S. Government is handled through another highly secure web portal which supports protected email, chat and other features.

Project Vigilant is funded by BBHC Global, an information security firm based in the Midwest, and private donations. Uber's boss is Steven Ruhe, the Managing Member of BBHC Global. "I've always been a small town guy with big dreams," said Ruhe who was born and raised in Nebraska and sells Amway products on the side. "This work is for a really good cause."

Project Vigilant is organized and run on a structure not unlike that of the military. Uber himself will serve only two more years in his "tour of duty" as the Project's Director and then another member will take his place.

"This is the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life," said Uber. "I'm helping keep our country safer."

Uber told Computer World that he decided to divulge his group's role in directing Lamo to turn into an informant because he thought that Lamo's patriotic act was being unfairly disparaged.

What's really going on here is that the ability to construct dossiers on citizens' Internet activities has increased dramatically over the last several years, as increasing parts of citizens' private lives take place online.  Put another way -- and this isn't news -- online privacy has all but evaporated.  Virtually every step anyone takes online -- from the websites they visit to the transactions they engage in -- are not only now stored and tracked by multiple companies, but are then compiled and made available to a wide variety of groups.  As a Wall St. Journal article from this weekend documents, the original impetus for this comprehensive tracking was a commercial one:  the more websites and advertisers know about you, the more they can make use of that knowledge, from auctioning you to various advertisers, selling the data about you, and catering messages and ads to your profile.  As the ACLU's long-time privacy expert Chris Calabrese told me this morning, "virtually every step you take online is now tracked by numerous mechanisms and instantly processed."

But it's the re-packaging and transfer of this data to the U.S. Government -- combined with the ability to link it not only to your online identity (IP address), but also your offline identity (name) -- that has made this industry particularly pernicious.  There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves.  It requires both huge resources and expertise.  Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens.  And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision).

But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles.  As a result, the Government is able to circumvent the legal and logistical restrictions on maintaining vast dossiers on citizens, and is doing exactly that.  While advertisers really only care about your online profile (IP address) in order to assess what you do and who you are, the Government wants your online activities linked to your actual name and other identifying information.  As Calabrese put it:  "it's becoming incredibly easy for these companies to link your IP information to who you really are, by, for example, tracing it to your Facebook page or other footprints you leave with your identifying information."  As but one example, The Washington Post recently began automatically linking any visitors --without their knowledge or consent -- to their logged-in Facebook page.  The information turned over to the Government is now easily linkable -- and usually linked -- to the citizens' actual identity.

An incredibly prescient 2004 Report from the ACLU documented the flourishing problem back then.  This was its title:

The Report documents how two early Bush era surveillance programs were killed by Congress for overreaching:  one -- the Total Information Awareness project from John Poindexter -- which would have data mined virtually all online data to detect individuals of interest to the Government, and a second -- the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) -- which was designed to recruit 1 million private citizens to inform the Government of suspicious acts.  But as the ACLU Report warned, both projects ended up being developed in alternative forms.  Indeed, a wide array of government agencies have created countless programs to encourage and formally train various private workers (such as cable installers, utilities workers and others who enter people's homes) to act as government informants and report any "suspicious" activity; see one example here.  Meanwhile, TIA has been replicated, and even surpassed, as a result of private industries' willingness to do the snooping work on American citizens which the Government cannot do.

Oftentimes, private corporations simply turn over whatever information the Government requests even in the absence of legal compulsion.  They do so due to a variety of motives:  an eagerness to build profitable relationships with the Government, fear of regulatory or legal reprisals if they resist, or a belief that they are being patriotic.  Numerous large corporations, such as airlines, have been caught voluntarily turning over to the Government vast amounts of invasive information about their passengers.  And, of course, the illegal Bush NSA spying program was accomplished by the voluntary (though highly profitable) participation by most of the telecom industry, which literally turned over unfettered access to the Government to their customers' calling and Internet records and even communication content.

But it's the emergence of a private market for this data -- whereby the Government pays corporations to collect, process and then furnish it -- that has vastly elevated the Government's ability to collect such data about citizens.  As the ACLU Report put it, this arrangement provides the best of all worlds for the Government and the worst for citizens:

The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny.That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .

In light of this, it's not surprising that -- just as is true for all of their surveillance activities -- government officials have been actively developing ways to recruit private corporations into spying on American citizens for them.  The FBI created a particularly creepy program -- called InfraGard -- in which 23,000 companies (including most of the Fortune 500) are in an information-sharing program with federal law enforcement agencies.  From the ACLU Report:

The program has more than 10,000 members organized into 79 local chapters; the list of participating companies is kept secret. Members wishing to participate fully must undergo a security check and obtain clearance by the FBI.  The Cleveland Plain Dealerdescribed it as a "a vast informal network of powerful friends," a "giant group of tipsters" created by the FBI under a "philosophy of quietly working with corporate America" in order to "funnel security alerts away from the public eye and receive tips on possible illegal activity."

But there is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations -- some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers -- into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI. . . .

There is a long and unfortunate history of cooperation between government security agencies and powerful corporations to deprive individuals of their privacy and other civil liberties, and any program that institutionalizes close, secretive ties between such organizations raises serious questions about the scope of its activities, now and in the future.

Another option open to government agencies seeking information on individuals is to simply purchase it on the open market.  As private-sector information-gathering has exploded in recent years, so has the amount of data that is now available to the government (and any other customer) willing to pay the price.  Although government information-purchasing was once a minor matter, the explosion of private-sector data collection has begun to significantly undermine the laws meant to protect Americans from government snooping.

Just to bring us full circle:  Chet Uber, the Executive Director of Project Vigilant, was one of the founding members of InfraGard (and again:  how incredibly lucky for the U.S. Government that the alleged WikiLeaks leaker, sitting in Iraq, just happened to pick one of Uber's underlings as the total stranger to whom he allegedly confessed his grave National Security crimes).

* * * * *

It's really beyond dispute that one has virtually no privacy from the Government.  That's not just true in theory, but in practice, as the Government seriously escalates the various ways it maintains dossiers on citizens.  Many privacy advocates have long taken some comfort in the fact that this data is too vast for the Government to figure out how to use, but with the aid of private industry and these strangely well-funded and sophisticated groups, there are clearly efforts to make this snooping far more useful and manageable.

Many people are indifferent to the disappearance of privacy -- even with regard to government officials -- because they don't perceive any real value to it.  The ways in which the loss of privacy destroys a society are somewhat abstract and difficult to articulate, though very real.  A society in which people know they are constantly being monitored is one that breeds conformism and submission, and which squashes innovation, deviation, and real dissent. 

The old cliché is often mocked though basically true:  there's no reason to worry about surveillance if you have nothing to hide.  That mindset creates the incentive to be as compliant and inconspicuous as possible:  those who think that way decide it's in their best interests to provide authorities with as little reason as possible to care about them.  That's accomplished by never stepping out of line.  Those willing to live their lives that way will be indifferent to the loss of privacy because they feel that they lose nothing from it.  Above all else, that's what a Surveillance State does:  it breeds fear of doing anything out of the ordinary by creating a class of meek citizens who know they are being constantly watched.

But even those who think that way should appreciate the real importance of these developments. Consider the rage that has been directed over the last week toward WikiLeaks.  They are predictably accused of beingAmerica's Enemy, in alliance with Al Qaeda, a Terrorist group, etc. etc.  One of their volunteers -- U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum -- was detained for three hours at the airport yesterday when re-entering the country from a foreign trip, denied access to a lawyer, had his cellphones seized and his laptop searched, and was told he'd likely be subjected to this treatment every time he left the U.S. and tried to re-enter.   Why has WikiLeaks provoked such animosity?  Because they committed the gravest sin:  they breached the Absolute Wall of Secrecy behind which our Government, and its private National Security and Surveillance State partners, operate.  That's why WikiLeaks is so despised, deemed such a threat:  because they are undermining in very modest ways the absolute secrecy of these power factions, and many citizens have been trained to believe in the justifiability of that pervasive secrecy as well.

But while these factions demand total secrecy for their actions, they simultaneously demand that you have none for yours.  They want to know everything about what you do -- and are knowing all of that -- while you know nothing about what they do.   The loss of privacy is entirely one-way.  Government and corporate authorities have destroyed most vestiges of privacy for you, while ensuring that they have more and more for themselves.  The extent to which you're monitored grows in direct proportion to the secrecy with which they operate.  Sir Francis Bacon's now platitudinous observation that "knowledge itself is power" is as true as ever.  That's why this severe and always-growing imbalance is so dangerous, even to those who are otherwise content to have themselves subjected to constant monitoring.

Re-visiting Project Vigilant

On Monday, I wrote about the expanding private surveillance industry and its relationship with the government, with a focus on something called Project Vigilant as one particularly troubling, illustrative example.  That group's Executive Director, Chet Uber, generated substantial media attention -- in Forbes, Wired and elsewhere -- by appearing at a Defcon conference this weekend and claiming, among other things, that it was he who put Adrian Lamo in touch with his contacts at the "highest levels of the government" at "three letter agencies."  He further boasted that Project Vigilant is a group which "monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers," "tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can 'develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address,'" and then "hands much of that information to federal agencies."  The reasons these revelations would be alarming are obvious, and Law Professor Orin Kerr suggested that such activities would likely be illegal.

But over the past several days, I've become convinced that Uber's claims about his group are wildly exaggerated, rendering my concerns about it largely misguided and unwarranted.  In a follow-up post, Kerr points to and tentatively endorses this analysis from Richard Bejlitch, who makes a persuasive case that Project Vigilant is "largely a publicity stunt, meaning it was just invented and its so-called 'history' is an extension of someone's imagination."  I also had several email exchanges with Cato's Julian Sanchez, who spent the last several days investigating Project Vigilant and Uber's claims and -- for reasons he will detail in a piece he is writing -- also concluded that concerns about this group are largely unwarranted.  Numerous, knowledgeable readers -- both in the comment section to that post and via email -- have also offered compelling arguments as to why it's far more likely than not that Uber is basically engaged in a self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking campaign (not unlike Adrian Lamo), and thus, to put it mildly, is seriously hyping the importance of his group and what it does.

Anyone with even minimal credibility knows not to believe uncorroborated, fantastical claims simply because they are publicly touted.  What persuaded me of the authenticity of Uber's claims -- aside from their being reported in the above-mentioned credible publications by reporters who regularly cover surveillance issues -- were these twoarticles from last month in The Examiner by Mark Albertson, covering Project Vigilant at length.  Indeed, the second one was specifically devoted to addressing doubts about its seriousness:

It’s tempting to look at a secret group of cybercrime "monitors" and dismiss them as a group of lightweights trying to play cops and robbers in the Internet world. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The article identified numerous, sophisticated Internet experts -- former officials of the DOJ, DHS, the NSA and the New York Stock Exchange -- who were purportedly working with them.  All of this evidence together led me to conclude that the group was real and credible.  I interpreted my inability to gather more information about them -- including by speaking that morning with surveillance experts who had never heard of them, and attempting to find out background information about them and the corporation which "funds" it only to come up largely empty -- as simply a reflection of how covertly they operated.  In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical of these claims.

In sum, the dangers of the growing private surveillance industry and its increasing commercial relationship with the U.S. government are every bit as real and severe as I described.  But "Project Vigilant" is probably not an example of that.