Revelations About Massive UK Police Corruption Shows Why We Cannot -- And Must Not -- Trust The Spies

As Mike reported recently, the NSA has presented no credible evidence that its bulk metadata collection is stopping terrorist attacks, or keeping people safe. Instead, the argument in support of the secret activities of the NSA and its friends abroad has become essentially: "Trust us, we really have your best interests at heart." But that raises the question: Can we really do that? New revelations from The Independent newspaper about massive and thorough-going corruption of the UK police and judiciary a decade ago show that we can't: 

On Techdirt.

Why Exactly Do We Need To 'Protect' US And EU Foreign Investments Through TAFTA/TTIP Anyway?

Techdirt has already examined the issue of corporate sovereignty many times over the past year, as it has emerged as one of the most problematic areas of both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP. A fine article by Simon Lester of the Cato Institute examines a hidden assumption in these negotiations: that an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism is needed at all. 

On Techdirt.

India Developing Additional National Surveillance System; US Has No Moral High Ground To Protest

Like many other countries, India has been steadily extending its national surveillance capabilities. We wrote about its main Central Monitoring System (CMS) back in May last year, with more details in July. In news that shocked no one, we discovered in September that illegal surveillance is already taking place. And now, via The Economic Times, we learn that India has built another, completely independent system for spying on its citizens: 

On Techdirt.

Does The Fast Track Authority Bill Guarantee That Corporate Sovereignty Will Be One-Sided And Unfair?

Yesterday, Mike reported on the introduction of the "fast track authority" bill in the Senate, and pointed out some of its most troubling aspects. But it's a long document -- over 100 pages -- and hidden away within it are some other areas that raise important questions. Take, for example, Section 8, which concerns sovereignty: 

On Techdirt.

Latest Twist On DRM Of Physical Products: Machines Locked Down By Geolocation

Despite overwhelming evidence that the public hates DRM, companies persist in coming up with new ways to impose it in an effort to control how their products are used. Here's the latest twist, pointed out to us by @dozykraut: 

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EU's Advocate-General Says Dutch Allowing Unauthorized Downloads Is Incompatible With European Copyright Law

Back in 2012, Ben Zevenbergen wrote a long piece exploring a complicated Dutch case that had been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's highest court. It concerned the home-copying exception of European copyright legislation, and hinged on the question of whether the Dutch collecting society could charge for the "losses" that result from people downloading both authorized and unauthorized uploads. That distinction needs to be made, since in the Netherlands downloading copyright material is permitted, but uploading it is not. Manufacturers of blank media claimed that they should only have to pay a lower copyright levy that covered just the downloads of legally-uploaded materials. 

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Harvesting Waste Plastic In Emerging Economies As A Currency, To Reduce Pollution And Improve Lives

The very best solutions not only come up with a brilliant answer to an important problem, but often manage to help address other issues too. Here's one that seems to fit that bill, pointed out to us by Izabella Kaminska. It's called Plastic Bank, and its core idea is to address the growing problem of plastic waste on the land and in the world's oceans and rivers, especially in poorer countries. But along the way, it might achieve much more. Here's the idea: 

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Could 'Tailored Access Operations' Be An Alternative To 'Collect It All'?

One of the most contentious aspects of the NSA's surveillance is the central belief by General Alexander and presumably many others at the agency that it must "collect it all" in order to protect the public. To stand a chance of overturning that policy, those against this dragnet approach need to come up with a realistic alternative. An interesting article by Matt Blaze in the Guardian offers a suggestion in this regard that takes as its starting point the recent leaks in Der Spiegel about the extensive spying capabilities of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO). As Blaze points out: 

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Huawei's Global Head Of Cyber Security Wants The Government 'To Have As Much Data As Possible'

In Der Spiegel's recent revelations about the far-reaching nature of the NSA's spykit, it mentions several US companies, Samsung from South Korea, and one from China -- Huawei. Like the others, Huawei denied any knowledge of the modifications to its products that Der Spiegel claims are used by the NSA to break into systems. This isn't the first time that the finger has been pointed at Huawei. Some years back, Huawei was accused of facilitating spying for the Chinese government, but after an 18-month investigation, no evidence was found of this. That fact allowed John Suffolk, Global Head of Cyber Security for Huawei and the former UK Government CIO, to enjoy the irony of Snowden's leaks about backdoors in US products: 

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Wireless Mesh Networks, The NSA, And Re-building The Internet

One of the bitter lessons we learned from Snowden's leaks is that the Internet has been compromised by the NSA (with some help from GCHQ) at just about every level, from our personal software and hardware, through ISPs to major online services. That has prompted some in the Internet engineering community to begin thinking about how to put back as much of the lost security as possible. But even if that's feasible, it's clearly going to take many years to make major changes to something as big and complex as the Net. 

On Techdirt.

After Muzzling Scientists, Canadian Government Now Moves On To Book Burnings

Techdirt has been tracking the sorry saga of Canada's assault on free speech for a while, as it first muzzled scientists and librarians, and then clamped down on the public expressing its views. Now, it seems, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper is attacking knowledge by dismantling key scientific collections, as this post on The Tyee reports: 

On Techdirt.

Study: File Sharing Leads To More, Not Fewer, Musical Hits Being Written

As Techdirt has noted many times, much of the debate around filesharing is driven by dogma rather than data. That's beginning to change, although there has been a natural tendency to concentrate on economic issues: that is, whether filesharing causes sales of music and films to drop or not. But copyright is not fundamentally about making money: it's about encouraging creativity. So arguably a more important question to ask is: does filesharing harm or help creativity? That's precisely what an interesting new paper entitiled "Empirical Copyright: A Case Study of File Sharing and Music Output," written by Glynn S. Lunney, Professor of Law at the Tulane University School of Law in New Orleans, seeks to explore (found via TorrentFreak.) Here's the background: 

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Russian Authorities Threaten To Block CloudFlare And Other Key Infrastructural Sites

This is getting boring. Every time Techdirt writes about Russian Internet blocking, it's along the lines of: "just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, it does." Here's another one. As a post from TorrentFreak explains, Russia's telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor maintains a blacklist of sites that allegedly promote the usual bad stuff -- child pornography, criminal activities, suicide etc. In news that will surprise no one that understands how the Internet works, Roskomnadzor is finding it hard to enforce those blocks on material held on servers located outside Russia: 

On Techdirt.

Weird California Incident Last Year Points To The Real Threat To The Power Grid (Hint: It's Not Cyberattacks)

Via Bruce Schneier's blog, we learn of the following intriguing story published in Foreign Policy: 

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After 20 Years, It's Clear NAFTA Has Failed To Deliver Promised Benefits; So Why Trust TPP, TTIP Will Be Better?

Both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are based on the premise that by boosting trade and investment, general prosperity will increase too. And yet, despite the huge scale of the plans, and their major potential knock-on effects on the lives of billions of people, precious little evidence has been offered to justify that basic assumption. To its credit, the European Commission has at least produced a report (pdf) on the possible gains. But as I've analyzed elsewhere, the most optimistic outcome is only tangentially about increased trade, and requires a harmonization of two fundamentally incompatible regulatory systems through massive deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic. In any case, the much-quoted figures are simply the output of econometric models, which may or may not be valid, and require extrapolation to the rather distant 2027, by which time the world could be a very different place. 

On Techdirt.

How To Solve The Piracy Problem: Give Everyone A Basic Income For Doing Nothing

Here on Techdirt we often discuss economics in the absence of scarcity -- how the ability to make any number of digital copies for vanishingly small cost creates new business opportunities for creators. But could a kind of abundance exist in the physical world too? That's the question raised in a fascinating post on Salon about a vote that will take place in Switzerland: 

On Techdirt.

Italy's Communications Watchdog Assigns Itself Extrajudicial Powers To Order ISPs To Stop Copyright Infringement

The last six months have seen a fierce debate in Italy over a proposal by the Italian communications watchdog Agcom to grant itself wide-ranging powers to address alleged copyright infringement online. Here's how The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School described them: 

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European Commission Admits It Plans To Put 'Corporate Christmas List' Of IP Demands Into TAFTA/TTIP

A few months ago, we quoted the EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht, who is responsible for handling the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations on the European side, as saying: 

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Open Source Genomics

There's a revolution underway. It's digital, but not in the computing sector. I'm referring to the world of genomics, which deals with the data that resides inside all living things: DNA. As most people know, DNA uses four chemical compounds - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine - to encode various structures, most notably proteins, which are represented by stretches of DNA called genes. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

TTIP Update VIII

Even the European Commission admits that TAFTA/TTIP is not, primarily, a trade agreeement, because the trade barriers between the EU and the US are already so low that removing them will add little to the EU economy. According to a study [.pdf] put together for the European Commission, the uplift in 2027 would be only 24 billion euros on a GDP that was already 12,900 billion euros in 2012; that compares with the most favourable outcome touted by the report, which is 119 billion euros GDP uplift in 2027. However, that is predicated on massive deregulation - although the European Commission prefers to use the euphemism of "removing non-tariff barriers."

On Open Enterprise blog.

AllSeen's Internet of Things: All-Seeing Too?

A year ago, I wrote a piece about cloud computing's dark secret: that using it in Europe was probably equivalent to making all your files readily available to the US government. And that was before the Snowden revelations confirmed that this was no mere theoretical possibility. I'm not claiming any amazing prescience here: I certainly had no idea of the scale of what was going on, as I've explained in a series of posts on the NSA spying programme. But I can claim a deep and abiding unease about cloud computing, which is why I never jumped on that particular bandwagon, and have written relatively little about it on this blog. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about cloud computing's dark secret: that using it in Europe was probably equivalent to making all your files readily available to the US government. And that was before the Snowden revelations confirmed that this was no mere theoretical possibility. I'm not claiming any amazing prescience here: I certainly had no idea of the scale of what was going on, as I've explained in a series of posts on the NSA spying programme. But I can claim a deep and abiding unease about cloud computing, which is why I never jumped on that particular bandwagon, and have written relatively little about it on this blog. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/12/allseens-internet-of-things-all-seeing-too/index.htm#sthash.7v5Wi5d5.dpuf

Linux's New Game: the Internet of Things

Last week I wrote about my recent talk on open access in which I pointed out that Linux has become the undisputed leader across huge swathes of computing. One area where that's not true is on the desktop, of course, and I fear it's unlikely to change, because of network effects: while there are lots of people using Windows and Office, and swapping data, it will be very hard to get many of them to switch. So that raises an interesting question: given Linux's success, where does it go next?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Last week I wrote about my recent talk on open access in which I pointed out that Linux has become the undisputed leader across huge swathes of computing. One area where that's not true is on the desktop, of course, and I fear it's unlikely to change, because of network effects: while there are lots of people using Windows and Office, and swapping data, it will be very hard to get many of them to switch. So that raises an interesting question: given Linux's success, where does it go next? - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/12/linuxs-new-game-the-internet-of-things/index.htm#sthash.vHBPWzjv.dpuf

Why Mozilla Was Right: GCHQ & NSA Track Cookies

During 2013, I've written a few articles about Mozilla's attempt to give users greater control over the cookies placed on their systems, and how the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) tried to paint this as Mozilla "undermining the openness", or "hijacking" the Internet because it dared to stand up for us in this way. That makes this latest revelation from the Snowden treasure-trove of documents, published in the Washington Post, rather important:

On Open Enterprise blog. 

Where Did ODF Disappear to? (And How to Fix it)

Readers with good memories may remember various key fights over the years that were largely about ODF and OOXML. The first round culminated in the extraordinarily shoddy fast-tracking of OOXML through the ISO standards process. Then we had a big battle over open standards in general, which also involved ODF and OOXML, where the UK government performed a dizzying series of U-turns. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Access: Looking Back, Looking Forwards

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002).

On Open Enterprise blog.