Big Content's latest antipiracy weapon: extradition

By Timothy B. Lee | Published about 4 hours ago

As major American copyright holders continue their long war on file-sharing, the focus of the debate has increasingly shifted overseas. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun seizing the domain names of so-called rogue sites based overseas. And copyright interests are pushing for the passage of the PROTECT IP Act, which would draft various intermediaries, including DNS providers, into the fight against such sites.

In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a "link site" that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy.

The extradition request is remarkable; O'Dwyer has no obvious connection to the United States. He hasn't set foot there since he was a small child, his servers were not located there, and it's not clear he has broken UK law. With his family's support, O'Dwyer is fighting extradition and seeking a trial in the United Kingdom instead.

The case is likely to become a new focal point in the ongoing global debate—one that exploded in the 1990s among legal scholars and has been raging ever since—over who has jurisdiction to try crimes committed wholly online. Extradition is normally reserved for the most serious crimes; critics doubt that operating a linking site qualifies. If O'Dwyer is extradited to the United States, it could set the precedent that website operators around the world are obligated to comply with American laws, even if they differ from the laws in their own country. If they don't, they could face US justice.



We recently covered the legal battle over Hotfile, an online "cyberlocker" site that Hollywood studios have accused of facilitating massive illegal downloading of their movies. In their complaint, the studios said that Hotfile relies on "link sites" to "host, organize, and promote URL links" to its content.

O'Dwyer's site, TVshack, was allegedly such a link site. It served as a clearinghouse for users to share links to movies and television shows available for free—but not necessarily legal—download. It's no longer online, but cached copies suggest that most of the links were to Hollywood content like Toy Story 3, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and episodes of "Family Guy." Needless to say, these copies weren't authorized by the relevant copyright holders.

It was a profitable venture. As TVshack's traffic grew, O'Dwyer began selling advertising space on the site. Richard's mother Julia told Ars that she first became concerned when she learned how much money her son was making. "It was apparent that this income was becoming bigger and bigger," she said. "He wasn't that interested in generating an income, and I think he was getting a bit frightened."

A knock on the door

In late June 2010, the TVshack.net domain name was seized in a virtual sting by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a move made possible by the fact that all .com and .net domain names are registered through US companies. As usual, ICE redirected the TVshack domain to a banner indicating the domain name had been seized by the federal government. (ICE has previously noted that most of these requests for takedowns come from industry, and it works closely with groups like the MPAA.)

O'Dwyer didn't back down. Within days, he had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.



The feds were not amused. In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's house. Julia told Ars what happened next.

"They had two American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE," she said. "They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour." The police also seized two of Richard's computers.

"The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'"

Julia says the men didn't ask him to take TVShack down, but he closed it himself. Nevertheless, the TVShack.cc domain was also (eventually) seized by ICE.

"A big shock"

Richard was asked to report to his local police station on May 23, 2011. "We got him a lawyer, and I arranged to go with him to the police station," Julia said. "We thought that he was going to either be charged with an offense in the UK or to be further questioned."

Instead, the O'Dwyers learned that the British investigation had been dropped. Instead, the US had requested Richard's extradition. "That was a big shock," Julia said. "Obviously, that had never entered our heads, that that's what would be happening on that day—or any other day, for that matter."

"I can't see how they can say that there is a connection" to the United States, she added. "He had no servers in America. He was never in America since he was 5 years old. It just seems like ICE are trying to make the rules to suit them."

Forcing Richard to stand trial in the United States would be a severe hardship for his family, Julia said. "It will cost £1500 at least to have a trip to America. And then you go all that way for an hour's visiting time in jail. It seems ridiculous. The threat of being extradited is like an extra punishment that you're given before you even get to any charges."

The rarity of extradition

So why is Richard being taken to America rather than being allowed to stand trial in the UK? The American law enforcement agencies behind the extradition request declined to comment on the case when we asked. But Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director for ICE, has told the Guardian that the United States regards any website with a US-controlled domain like .net to be within its jurisdiction. Until now, ICE's campaign against these websites has been focused on domain name seizures, but O'Dwyer's case may represent the first escalation of that campaign to include the extradition of website owners.

The effort to extradite Richard is almost unprecedented. We could only find two examples of individuals extradited to the United States for computer crimes committed without ever setting foot here.

One of them, Gary McKinnon, was a UK citizen who was accused of hacking into Pentagon and NASA computer systems—a case which therefore had a much clearer US nexus. At last report, he was still in the UK fighting extradition. The other example is Australian resident Hew Griffiths, who was sent to the United States on warez charges in 2007 after a 3-year extradition fight. He served a total of 51 months in jail for his leadership role in the software cracking group DrinkOrDie.

Richard's mother also points to the case of Ryan Cleary, a 19-year-old Brit who was arrested in June 2011 for his alleged role in the LulzSec hacker group. "I wouldn't suggest that he should be extradited, because I wouldn't wish that on anyone," she said. But she noted that LulzSec has attacked numerous American targets, including the CIA. She wondered why her son is being extradited while Cleary is apparently being allowed to stand trial in the UK despite a much more direct connection to the United States.

The legality of linking

It's not clear whether O'Dwyer has even committed a crime under UK law. O'Dwyer is not accused of hosting infringing content himself. Instead, his site provided links to content hosted by other websites. In December, a British judge ruled in favor of TV-Links, a website that, like Tvshack, offered links to video content, some of it infringing.

What about the United States? Ars asked Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt, for comment. He pointed to the Supreme Court's 2005 Grokster decision, under which defendants can be held liable for "inducing" their users to infringe copyright. He said that if O'Dwyer was "linking multiple times to content that is entirely or almost essentially infringing," which it appears he was, then O'Dwyer likely faces "secondary liability" under copyright law.

However, he said, "it is so unusual to have this prosecuted under criminal statutes. Criminal copyright infringement is extremely rare. Typically we'd be looking at people who would manufacture or import pirate DVDs."

O'Dwyer's mother said that if Richard were found guilty in the UK, the maximum penalty for his actions would be just two years of prison, compared to five years in the United States.

Britain's lopsided extradition rules

Julia places most of the blame for her son's predicament at the feet of her own government. In 2003, Britain signed what critics regard as a one-sided treaty with the United States. The treaty makes it more difficult to extradite an American citizen to the United Kingdom than the other way round.

The O'Dwyers have a powerful voice on their side; in June, the Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights issued a report calling for extradition reforms.

One proposed reform in particular would help Richard's case, a provision allowing a judge to deny extradition requests if the alleged conduct occurred in the UK and "it would not be in the interests of justice" for the defendant to be tried in the requesting country. Language to this effect was included in a 2006 Police and Justice Bill, but to overcome political opposition, it was rendered inactive before final passage.

"Parliament has already agreed to this principle and the Government should bring forward the relevant provisions," the Joint Committee wrote in its June report. "It is difficult to understand why this has not yet happened."

Richard's next court date isn't until September, so there's still time to change the law. "If they just sat down in parliament and changed it, it would be in action within a month," his mother said.

But so far she's been frustrated by the pace of change. "These politicians always say they have no power. Why do we have powerless people running our country?"

The case against extradition

Both experts we spoke with were critical of the American government's move to extradite Richard. Gervais pointed out that the case could have sweeping implications. "Because so many copyright owners are actually US-based companies, it would basically make US courts the world criminal courts for copyright infringement," he said.

And it could be even worse than that. If people can be extradited for copyright infringement by countries in which they haven't set foot, "every website like this could give rise to prosecution in several jurisdictions. It will become impossible for the person to defend without spending millions of dollars."

Corynne McSherry, the Intellectual Property Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed. "We should think long and hard about whether IP is something we want to extradite people across borders for," she told Ars.

She pointed to the case of Rojadirecta.org, a Spanish site which had its domain name seized by ICE earlier this year. "Two separate courts found that [the site] was legal" in Spain, she said. "Nonetheless, action was taken in the US. Now imagine if we tried to extradite them to the US. Think about the message that would send about our respect for the other court."

She also warned that the effort could backfire. Imagine "you do something that violates French copyright law," she said. "They don't have a First Amendment. They have a different regime for IP. You'd be worried if French could extradite you and bring you to a French court."

McSherry lays the ultimate blame for ICE's aggressive stance at the feet of domestic content industries. "There is a fair amount of pressure being brought to bear by the content industries and media to 'do something' about online infringement," she said. "I think this is a response to that. The question we need to ask is whether that responsiveness is causing collateral damage to other interests."

Reached by e-mail, the Motion Picture Association of America declined to comment.

Years of debate

The debate over extradition in this case is just one strand of a long-running argument about "borders" and "jurisdiction" on the Internet. Law professors were especially concerned about the question in the mid-1990s, when famous articles like "Law And Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace" by David Post and David Johnson made sweeping statements about the problems of government authority on the "borderless" 'Net.

Efforts to control the flow of electronic information across physical borders—to map local regulation and physical boundaries onto Cyberspace—are likely to prove futile, at least in countries that hope to participate in global commerce. Individual electrons can easily, and without any realistic prospect of detection, "enter" any sovereign's territory. The volume of electronic communications crossing territorial boundaries is just too great in relation to the resources available to government authorities to permit meaningful control.

As for which law to apply, Post and Johnson argued that questions of jurisdiction were a total mess; every law might apply to everyone!

Because events on the Net occur everywhere but nowhere in particular, are engaged in by online personae who are both "real" (possessing reputations, able to perform services, and deploy intellectual assets) and "intangible" (not necessarily or traceably tied to any particular person in the physical sense), and concern "things" (messages, databases, standing relationships) that are not necessarily separated from one another by any physical boundaries, no physical jurisdiction has a more compelling claim than any other to subject these events exclusively to its laws.

"Realists" objected to this view, saying 1) that governments certainly could (and did) create Internet borders and that 2) the jurisdictional questions weren't nearly as complicated as the cyber-libertarians suggested. (Perhaps the best statement of this view came in the 2006 book Who Controls the Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu.)

In his 1998 paper "Against Cyberanarchy," Harvard's Jack Goldsmith noted that the Internet wasn't really a free for all in which any nation could enforce any of its laws against any netizen. Instead, as a practical matter, laws would only be enforced against:
(i) persons with a presence or assets in the nation’s territory; (ii) persons over whom the nation can obtain personal jurisdiction and enforce a default judgment against abroad; or (iii) persons who the nation can successfully extradite.

When someone like O'Dwyer causes an alleged harm in the US but has no assets here and no residence here, the government has generally left such people to the justice of their own governments (unless they have done something to specifically target American users as offshore gambling sites did by, say, accepting money in US dollars). But as the O'Dwyer case suggests, at least one part of the US government sees Goldsmith's third point as a reminder that it's not powerless to reach such people. Instead, it's a call to action: let's start extraditing!

A question of proportion

It's hard to defend Richard O'Dwyer's actions. He appears to have knowingly profited from large-scale copyright infringement, even if he didn't directly host the content. It's not entirely clear if he broke the letter of the law in either the UK or the US, but we can't fault content companies and law enforcement officials for at least pursuing his site.

But the effort to extradite O'Dwyer to the United States seems disproportionate and unfair. O'Dwyer resided in the United Kingdom throughout the time period when he was operating TVshack. Unless there's evidence his actions were specifically directed at the United States—and simply operating a linking site in English or signing up for a .com/.net domain hardly seems like such evidence—any trial against him should occur in the UK. We're confident that there are more urgent uses of US law enforcement and judicial resources.

A pound of flesh: how Cisco's "unmitigated gall" derailed one man's life

By Ian Mulgrew | Published about 16 hours ago

High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. An official court video camera recorded the proceedings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affably answering questions in an elegant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, however, two plainclothes women—the shorter one brandishing a badge—and two uniformed police officers entered the room. Adekeye was confused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the special judicial master conducting the hearing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

"I'm from the RCMP," the taller woman said, "I'm sorry I have to interrupt your meeting here."

"Hello," Adekeye said.

"I'm looking for—are you a Mr. Peter Alfred-Adekeye?"

"Yes."

"How do you say your name?"

"Add-a-kay."

"Add-a-kay," she repeated.

The lawyers interjected—"this is off the record," "on the record."

"I just want to speak with you," the officer continued. "Mr. Adekeye, the reason I'm here..."

"Wait, we're conducting a deposition here," the special master said as decorum collapsed and the video was shut off.

The recording resumed at 5:40pm, the camera focused on an empty chair with the special master speaking. "The interruption makes it impossible to continue the deposition today and, in my opinion, tomorrow," he said. "So I think that this deposition will be suspended until further notice."

Meanwhile, Adekeye was being perp-walked through the swanky hotel lobby, paraded past its well-heeled and powerful patrons and into a waiting paddy wagon. With that, the former Cisco executive, a British citizen with a blemish-free record and a sterling resume, dropped down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole that would tie up a year of his life.

The judge who freed Adekeye a year later said the public would "blanche at the audacity" of the conduct of Cisco and US prosecutors, both of whom turned out to be involved in Adekeye's jailing and persecution.



 Adekeye's deposition and arrest

The "crime"

A week after his arrest and imprisonment, Adekeye appeared before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Arne Silverman, a six-year veteran of the province's highest trial bench. Adekeye was described as a "sinister" figure of uncertain citizenship on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking that carried a penalty of almost half-a-millennium in prison.

Canadian prosecutors said that, according to US Homeland Security, Adekeye slipped in and out of the US surreptitiously—and they could match up the dates of the offenses with dates he had unlawfully entered the country over a two-year period.

They made it sound like the crime of the century; in fact, throughout the specified time, Adekeye was living in America on a valid visa. And the heinous crime was accessing Cisco's internal systems on several occasions with a Cisco employee's permission.

As he stood in court for his first appearance, Adekeye couldn't believe what he heard—his citizenship was disparaged, his achievements derided. Prosecutors portrayed him not as a successful computer executive and innovator but rather as a Nigerian scofflaw who was a serious flight risk with a checkered, fugitive's past.

Justice Silverman was told the Canadian government had invoked the emergency provisions of the Extradition Act to obtain the arrest warrant—this case was that important and urgent. The judge who had issued the warrant had heard a similarly misleading story about Adekeye, who has held British citizenship since 2004; US prosecutors claimed they didn't have time to file a full extradition request because Adekeye might flee the country.

The extradition documentation was mostly a pack of "innuendo, half truths, and complete falsehoods," as a judge would later find, but it was impossible for Adekeye to counter without obtaining documentation from Europe. He was denied bail and would remain in custody for 28 days while his lawyers mustered supporting material to refute the charges presented to the court. He was finally released only under strict bail conditions that forced him to surrender his passport and remain in Vancouver unless given permission to travel elsewhere in Canada.

By then, he understood only too well how he had been pursued by Cisco. The Canadian authorities, however, and the judges who issued the arrest warrant and denied Adekeye bail, remained in the dark. They were unaware Adekeye's alleged crimes were part of a bigger legal battle he was waging against the $7 billion computer firm.

As part of its response to his litigation, Cisco had accused Adekeye in a civil countersuit of using his former colleague's computer credentials to obtain services worth "more than $14,000." No one ever explained the "magic" of that number—whether it meant $15,000 or $1 million—even the judges couldn't figure it out.

Cisco had pushed for Adekeye's arrest, apparently as part of its litigation strategy to derail the damaging antitrust suit that Adekeye launched in December 2008. They allegedly wanted him kept in custody to pressure him into settling or withdrawing his suit; they succeeded in keeping him locked up for a month. Normally, on a case like this, a non-violent defendant without a criminal record who wasn't considered a flight risk would have been out on bail in a day.

Good relationships gone bad

Adekeye holds a B.Sc. with honors in Civil Engineering from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife and has completed executive leadership development courses at Stanford University. He earned a program leader certification from Kepner-Tregoe (the international management consulting training company), is a master troubleshooter, and an expert on ancient Japanese martial arts. He has founded two nonprofit initiatives to foster the growth of entrepreneurship and technology to improve global human capital development.

Cisco hired Adekeye in London after he had earned a reputation working in various engineering positions at IBM Global Services and at AT&T Global Network Services. As a senior UK executive within Cisco's advanced engineering services group, Adekeye dealt with strategic ISP clients that had network assets in excess of US$1 billion—companies such as AT&T, Level 3, UUNet/WorldCom and Global Crossing.

In 2003, Cisco moved him to the US. From the outside, Adekeye appeared to excel in various technical and non-technical leadership positions at Cisco. He led the Core Architecture Solutions group, which was responsible for all source code-level IOS and IOS-XR operating system software, ASIC-level hardware, and technology concerns raised by Internet service providers, governments, and Fortune 500 customers worldwide. He also was intimately involved with the company's router-systems units.

He lived in America under different visas and work permits until he left Cisco to form his own Silicon Valley companies in 2005: Multiven, a global provider of Internet infrastructure maintenance services, and Pingsta, an expertise-in-the-cloud software and services provider along with its open Internet intelligence repository, mySolvr.
 

A 2008 interview with Adekeye

Almost from the start, Cisco complained that Adekeye was trading on his insider knowledge of its products and was poaching key employees. He denied their accusations.

In 2008, Adekeye moved back to Britain and later to Zurich. On December 1, 2008, Multiven initiated litigation that alleged Cisco harmed it and consumers by forcing customers to buy maintenance contracts for Cisco operating systems and applications, contracts that covered future bug fixes and updates. (Think of a car dealer able to force all customers to return for every repair and servicing.) If successful, the suit would have enormous repercussions for Cisco.

As the case moved through the courts, Adekeye attempted to return to America to participate. He was denied entry. He tried unsuccessfully for months to get back into the US but was continually refused. He even wrote without success to President Barack Obama seeking his intervention.

When the judge handling the antitrust suit was informed of the problem, Cisco was offered the opportunity to depose Adekeye in Switzerland or Britain. But a request would first have to be made to the government in either country and the cost of such an undertaking would be considerable. Cisco balked. As a result, the court chose Vancouver—a short flight from San Jose and a city in a country that apparently didn't have to be informed of a foreign judicial hearing occurring on its soil. Vancouver fit the bill: easy to get to, no complications, and inexpensive. Cisco agreed.

Far from trying to avoid a showdown, Adekeye, denied legal entry to America, flew from Zurich to Vancouver to testify. Early on May 20, however, after two days of hearings, Cisco officials in California swore out a criminal complaint against Adekeye based on the allegations of illegal computer access.

According to a later ruling from a US judge overseeing the Multiven/Cisco litigation, Adekeye had in fact used a Cisco employee's login credentials (with the employee's permission) to access Cisco's secure internal network on multiple occasions. Adekeye "admitted that his reason for accessing Cisco's secure website was to gather information about which Cisco employees have access to 'bug fixes,'" wrote the judge. Adekeye said that he believed the Cisco employee's authorization constituted "permission" to access the network, but the judge disagreed that this was a reasonable belief to hold.

Based on this charge, Cisco complained to federal officials and told US authorities that Adekeye had left their jurisdiction but was in Vancouver and might flee.

Cisco issued a brief statement in response to my inquiries. "The US Secret Service issued a criminal complaint after nearly two years of investigation alleging that Mr. Adekeye violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 97 distinct instances, and as a result a federal judge signed an arrest warrant for Mr. Adekeye," it said. "Ultimately, this case is a matter between US and Canadian governmental authorities.

"Cisco also sued Mr. Adekeye based on evidence that he, the CEO of Multiven and an ex-employee of Cisco, stole information and software from Cisco using a current employee's credentials. The judge in that case found that Mr. Adekeye's conduct violated the federal anti-hacking statute."

The authorities sprang into action, calling the Canadian government and urging it to use extraordinary powers to arrest Adekeye. Within hours, federal prosecutors were before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask seeking a warrant, painting their dire picture of a nefarious suspect and conjuring a burning sense of urgency. But Canada had been duped.

The settlement

Two months after Adekeye's arrest, Cisco settled Multiven's antitrust suit with an effective date of July 19, 2010—the day before the US judge overseeing the case ruled that Adekeye had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (This put the judge's ruling into a sort of legal limbo.)

More importantly, Cisco abandoned its previous service contract practices. Adekeye had won and, although all the details of the out-of-court settlement were not made public, Multiven and others now could service Cisco products.

In addition, Cisco also dropped the illicit computer access charge against Adekeye. Strangely, none of that halted the extradition proceedings against him in Vancouver—that would take another nine months.

"This is the other astonishing thing that has me scratching my head," said his local lawyer, Marilyn Sandford. "The civil claim was settled and the counter-claim [over the $14,000 in computer access] was dropped and my client and his companies didn't pay one nickel to Cisco. Yet the extradition case continues. It boggles the mind."

"It is simply not done"

In May 2011, nearly a year to the day after his deposition and arrest, Adekeye was vindicated. In a stinging decision, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ronald McKinnon rebuked both Canadian and American authorities for an appalling abuse of process and, in a rare move, he stayed extradition proceedings against Adekeye. (Read McKinnon's complete ruling [PDF].)

Justice McKinnon was stunned that a trivial $14,000 civil tort had been transformed into a criminal proceeding so as to engage the full might and resources of two governments and to mislead one of Canada's senior trial courts. It was shocking, he said.

The justice dismissed three thick volumes of legal precedent filed by Canadian federal government lawyer Diba Majzub, who said that it didn't matter if Adekeye was falsely characterized. At the end of the last century, after several high-profile requests dragged on for years (some as long as a decade), the government changed the Extradition Act to make the court's job little more than that of a rubber stamp. It was America's job, said Majzub, to rule on the merits of Adekey's case—not Canada's.

Only five times since 1999 has a Canadian judge refused to send a fugitive to America to face justice because of an abuse of process. All were extraordinary cases involving, for instance, a terror suspect captured and tortured overseas. Majzub, who represented the US at the hearing, offered no reasonable explanation from American authorities or from Cisco for what had happened. He said only that any mistakes were made in good faith; no one was being malicious or acting out of improper motives.

Nevertheless, Justice McKinnon said US prosecutors acted outrageously by having the executive arrested during his deposition in front of Cisco's lawyers, who could only have been delighted at his humiliation. (As Adekeye's company later put it, "The arrest took place in the presence of a US High Court Judge appointed Special Master, Mr. George Fisher, with Cisco's lawyers insisting on filming the entire arrest 'on the record.'")

"It speaks volumes for Cisco's duplicity," the judge fumed.

Justice McKinnon was flabbergasted that police had interrupted a judicial proceeding to nab Adekeye. "It is simply not done in a civilized jurisdiction that is bound by the rule of law," he said.

For centuries, going back at least to the 1500s, the custom and law in Britain and the nations that adopted its legal system was unequivocally clear: you don't arrest people while they are testifying. This was an egregious abuse of process and brought the administration of justice into disrepute, Justice Mackinnon concluded, adding it was obvious the RCMP didn't realize they were barging into a court hearing.

He suggested that Adekeye's ordeal was something out of Catch-22, the celebrated Joseph Heller novel. He also said Cisco had "the unmitigated gall" to try and use the criminal process to humiliate and force Adekeye to abandon the civil suit. At best, the allegations of criminal computer access, if real, should have been consolidated to a single charge carrying at most 15 years imprisonment.

Regardless, Justice McKinnon said, it was a perversion of justice to allow the criminal law to be used to resolve a trivial civil suit and it shouldn't be countenanced. If Canada had known the true facts, he maintained it would not have proceeded.

"Here we have a man who has no criminal record, who made every possible effort to comply with US immigration laws and procedures, but who dared to take on a multinational giant, rewarded with criminal charges that have been so grotesquely inflated as to make the average well-informed member of the public blanche at the audacity of it all," Justice McKinnon added.

The entire incident, in his opinion, was a planned and deliberate act by Cisco with the collusion of the US prosecutors to transform a minor civil complaint into a criminal charge requiring 500 years imprisonment. All the US had to do was let Adekeye into the country, Justice McKinnon said, but instead astoundingly misled Canada into launching expensive legal proceedings.



Multiven's services pitch

Back to Europe

"Almost nothing in the US attorney's letter was true," Adekeye's lawyer Sandford said afterwards. The prosecutors relied on innuendo and half-truths to dupe Justice Leask into issuing the arrest warrant and Justice Silverman into jailing Adekeye.

Sandford called the US conduct careless, cavalier, and Kafkaesque. She scoffed at the excuses. Cisco has a reputation for playing litigation hardball, she said, and she thought this was another example of that take-no-prisoners strategy. For instance, the company recently was ordered to pay nearly $75 million in a patent infringement fight during which the true patent owner complained, as one Israeli newspaper put it, that he was portrayed as "a greedy Jew who wanted to fill his pockets with money and take it to Israel."

"There is nothing wrong with aggression in litigation but there are rules and standards of fair play and they were not adhered to by this civil litigation," Sandford added. "This litigant wanted its pound of flesh."

Adekeye left Canada immediately after the verdict. He planned to spend time in London with his daughter and then rejoin his wife and two-year-old son in Switzerland. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Sandford said that Adekeye remains shaken by the ordeal and is considering seeking redress. Still, she added: "He's overjoyed it's over."

Deep packet inspection used to stop censorship in new "Telex" scheme

By Timothy B. Lee

The Internet has become so economically important that few countries can afford to cut off access altogether. Instead, repressive regimes allow 'Net access, but try to block individual websites they don't want their populations to see. Some users, aided by allies in the West, use circumvention technologies like Web proxies or TOR to access forbidden information. This has led to a long-running cat-and-mouse game in which censorship opponents establish new proxies while censors race to identify and block them.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed technology that they hope can decisively tilt the playing field toward free speech. Their system, called Telex, is an "end-to-middle" proxy scheme. That is, rather than explicitly directing traffic to a proxy server, users "tag" traffic they want proxied and transmit it to an ordinary website that happens to have a Telex-enabled router between it and the user. The router recognizes the tag and silently redirects the packets to their real destination.

The trick is that the tags need to be encoded in a way that the Telex system can detect but that the censor cannot. Otherwise, the censor would simply block tagged traffic.

The system accomplishes this using a clever tweak to the TLS handshake that occurs whenever a browser initiates an encrypted Web connection. One of the steps in that handshake requires the client to choose a random bit string known as a "nonce." If a client wants Telex to redirect the connection, it uses Telex's public key to generate a steganographic "tag." The tag format is carefully chosen so that someone who knows the Telex private key will be able to recognize the tag efficiently—but no one else will be able to distinguish it from a random string.

The Telex system consists of "stations" connected to routers at various points in the Internet's architecture. The stations use deep packet inspection to monitor all the TLS handshakes that go across the wire and look for nonces that are Telex tags. Once the Telex station sees a tag, it hijacks the connection, sending a TCP reset command to the original destination and serving as a proxy between the client and its actual destination.

The beauty of this scheme, if implemented well, is that from the perspective of a censor near the end user, a Telex-proxied connection is indistinguishable from ordinary communication with a website that the censor considers innocuous. The authors envision a large-scale deployment in which most network routes out of the target country includes at least one Telex-enabled router. Then the censor won't have any way to prevent, or even detect, traffic to websites it wishes to block—unless it cuts off all access to the Internet beyond its borders.

Could this be done at the scale required by real-world ISPs? "Widescale Telex deployment will likely require Telex stations to scale to thousands of concurrent connections, which is beyond the capacity of our prototype," the authors write.

But Alex Halderman, the Michigan computer science professor who led the Telex team, told Ars that the technology is very amenable to distributed approaches, which the team plans to investigate in future work. Also, the fact that Telex is implemented as separate devices attached to routers, rather than a function of the router itself, means Telex will "fail open." That is, if a station gets overwhelmed, the router will revert to the behavior of an ordinary, non-Telex router.
Who will deploy it?

Halderman said that once the engineering details are ironed out, government help will likely be needed to get a system like Telex off the ground. There's no obvious market incentive to adopt a system like Telex, but its deployment could serve the diplomatic interests of liberal democracies. So Western governments could provide subsidies, tax breaks, or other incentives for their domestic ISPs to participate. The cost of adopting Telex "would be relatively moderate compared to other international relations scale activities that governments do," Halderman said.

Governments can also provide political cover. "ISPs might not want to jump on board with this unless they know that other ISPs are going to do so," he said. "If you're a company that has international business, you're not going to want to be singled out." However, he said, if a Western government persuaded all of its ISPs to adopt Telex simultaneously, it would be much more difficult for repressive regimes to retaliate against any single ISP.

A Special Education Worker Talks About Empty Paychecks, Organizing

 

By Steve Lemken

In a country where jobs are at a premium, having one in a public school that allows you to buy into a medical benefit package is a pretty good deal, right? Sure, if you overlook that paying for the benefits and taxes on the salary may leave you with a net of zero take home pay.

It’s an all-too-common story and it’s the one facing Kathy Meltsakos, a special education paraprofessional working in northeast Massachusetts, hard by the Atlantic. She lives on the same street she grew up on and has worked the schools she attended years ago, bringing a deep knowledge of the generations of people living in and around her town into that work.

Education support professionals like Meltsakos and the rest of America’s workers are doing their best to weather today’s economy. But consider the numbers.

Initially earning $13.74 for a 35-hour week with the Pentucket schools, Meltsakos paid 20 percent of her insurance, which was manageable, and she did that for 10 years until laid off in June 2010. While looking for work she received unemployment benefits. She was later rehired at a lower pay rate, with five less hours, and with a higher contribution for her healthcare.

“I was placed at the bottom of the scale at $10.74 an hour for a 30-hour week. After taxes, I paid 60 percent of my medical insurance. My pay stubs from February to June 24 (the end of the school year) show no net take home pay since February. Oh – and the insurance rates went up in May.”

By April she was frustrated with no take home pay and knew she had to get a second job. “My husband is doing everything he can but we have kids in college and of course the regular bills to pay. I tried a pizza shop, then found work with a discount store, twenty hours a week during school, and a few more now that school is out. They pay a little more per hour but no benefits.” For the summer she landed a job with special ed kids for 20 hours a week at $14 an hour.

“I’m not the only ESP worker in the position of working two or three jobs to try to make ends meet,” Meltsakos said. “We are not looking for a free ride. But we have to question a system that forces workers in any profession to stitch together several pay streams to make ends meet. It can get debilitating. I check my life at the school door and am upbeat and positive because some days, I’m the only happy face those kids see. What is that worth to society?”

Meltsakos is not shy discussing economic facts, having been a local Massachusetts Teacher Association leader for 11 years. She served on her local bargaining team three times and currently serves as an MTA board member representing ESPs and teachers at the state level. She is also a graduate of the 2011 NEA ESP Leaders for Tomorrow program.

These days she works with students in the lower grades. She has worked with high school age students with special needs and would go back to them if a position opened in her district.

“This work is my career,” she says with pride. “I know what I’m doing and am good at what I do. Don’t get me wrong, I learn every day.” When asked about the economics of the job, she doesn’t beat around the bush. “Yes. It should pay better. We have a ways to go on that score. A lot of educating and organizing and bargaining is going to have to get done before any fair salary changes happen.”

Meltsakos has come to the conclusion that she, and ESPs and other education employees, must talk more with neighbors, lawmakers and others about the economics of work and home, living wages and what public school workers do at work.

“My thinking is that we need to speak more about family, community and business priorities, the work that we do and its worth to society. I think our neighbors should know what we are getting paid to educate and care for their children. I think they should know just about every penny gets plowed back into the community in the form of taxes, house payments and rent, buying food and clothes and all the rest. Just like the rest of the community. I want to see all of us succeed.”

Warming to the subject on her mind, Meltsakos said, “We’re taught from an early age not to talk a whole lot about earnings and comparing our salaries. It’s not ‘polite’. Well, we’ve had about thirty years of being polite about work and paychecks and look where that has got us.”

Meltsakos admits, “These are big issues. They can get complicated. But putting these kinds of conversations off and keeping our noses to the grindstone isn’t getting us out of this hole our state and our country finds itself in.”

“I think we have to start talking to a lot more people. Educating. Organizing. It won’t be easy, but it is better than doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result. Let’s start talking. Then we can make plans and take action.” (You can do just that by signing up to volunteer in the 2011 and 2012 campaigns for public education at EducationVotes.org.)

Meanwhile, Meltsakos will return to that job in September with a 55-cent an hour increase – and an increase in the cost of her medical benefits.

How Finland became an education leader

Harvard professor Tony Wagner explains how the nation achieved extraordinary successes by deemphasizing testing 
 

By David Sirota

How has one industrialized country created one of the world's most successful education systems in a way that is completely hostile to testing? That's the question asked -- and answered -- in a new documentary called "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System." Examining the nation with one of the most comparatively successful education systems on the planet, the film contradicts the test-obsessed, teacher-demonizing orthodoxy of education "reform" that now dominates America's political debate.

On my KKZN-AM760 radio show, I talked to Harvard researcher Tony Wagner, who narrates the film and who is the author of the 2008 book "The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need -- And What We Can Do About It." The interview became the basis for my recent newspaper column on the subject. Because that column generated so much feedback, I wanted to publish this abridged transcript of our larger discussion. You can listen to the full interview here.

What has Finland achieved, and what's the history behind its improved education system?
 
In the early 1970s, Finland had an underperforming education system and a pretty poor agrarian economy based on one product -- trees, and they were chopping them down at a rapid rate that wasn't going to get them very far. So they knew they had to completely revamp their education system in order to create a true knowledge-based economy.

So they began in the 1970s by completely transforming the preparation and selection of future teachers. That was a very important fundamental reform because it enabled them to have a much higher level of professionalism among teachers. Every teacher got a masters degree, and every teacher got the very same high quality level of preparation.

So what has happened since is that teaching has become the most highly esteemed profession. Not the highest paid, but the most highly esteemed. Only one out of every 10 people who apply to become teachers will ultimately make it to the classroom. The consequence has been that Finland's performance on international assessments, called PISA, have consistently outranked every other western country, and really there are only a handful of eastern countries that are educating with the same results.

So, Finland basically focuses on teachers and not on domestic testing. Those PISA tests that you cite are international assessments.
 
That's absolutely right. There is no domestic testing except a very quiet auditing program to test demographic samples of kids; not for accountability, not for public consumption, and not for comparison across schools. The fascinating thing is that because they have created such a high level of professionalism, they can trust their teachers. Their motto is "Trust Through Professionalism." The difference between the highest performing school in Finland and the lowest performing school in Finland is less than four percent, and that's without any testing at all.

This is the antithesis of what we're hearing about in the United States in terms of so-called education "reform." When you hear the debate in the United States over education, the idea is that we need to demonize teachers and that the real way to fix our education system is to simply test the hell out of kids. Why do you think there is such a difference between the attitudes of our two countries?
 
First of all I want to point out that Finland is rated among the highest in the world in innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. It's not your grandfather's socialist country in any sense of the word.

But beyond that, what I find so striking is that the reforms in [the U.S.] have been driven and led by businesses for the last quarter century. It was David Kearns at Xerox and Lou Gerstner at IBM calling for a national summit on education and they didn't invite any educators. They invited CEOs and governors and senators and congressmen.

Now, I understand and respect business needs for better skills, and I understand a certain mistrust of the education system based on the fact that it's the only profession where you're guaranteed a job for life. But what's different in Finland is that there has been a bipartisan consensus over 30 years about the importance of education and the importance of high-quality teaching as the real solution. It's been a partnership between businesses, policy makers and educators, and that's what we need in this country but don't have.

What would you say to folks who say you can't compare the United States' educational system to Finland's educational system because Finland has a homogenous population and the U.S. is a much more diverse population?
 
First, Finland is more diverse than people realize. Fifteen percent of the population speaks second languages. There are 45 languages spoken in Helsinki schools today. Point two for a point of comparison, and there are obviously huge differences, but it's not Finland as a country compared to US as a country. Finland has the size and population of about 33 of our states. So let's compare Finland to Minnesota -- very similar demographics, right? But not at all similar results in terms of international comparisons. So while it's true that there are differences, there's a lot we can learn from the Finnish story.

What about the role of economics? New York University professor Diane Ravitch often says that the education system in this country cannot alone solve poverty, and in many cases it will inherently reflect poverty. Finland is a much less economically unequal society. How much does that lack of poverty explain Finland's success as opposed to our own?
 
There are two answers to that. First of all, yes, race and class matter. You want to know what a test score in a district is, you find out how poor people are. There's no question that race and class, and the economic disparity in this country, go a very long way to understanding our achievement gap.

But having said that, I've been in some of this country's best schools in some of the wealthiest districts, and even some private schools, and I've seen stunningly mediocre teaching there with teachers teaching to the test. And the tests are primarily factual recall, memorization tests where students may pass, but will learn none of the skills that are necessary in the global knowledge economy.

This is what Finland has done that's different -- they've defined what is excellent teaching, not just reasonable teaching, and they have a standard for that. Second, they've defined what is most
important to learn, and it's not a memorization-based curriculum, but a thinking-based curriculum. So even in our wealthiest districts we're not approaching that global standard of success and excellence.

If we could somehow wave a wand and implement Finland's education system right now here in America, what do you think the results would look like? Would they be so much better, keeping in mind those economic disparities and that economic inequality?
 
It's going to take generations and I do believe we're going to have to address these economic disparities. But I've been in schools with high poverty, KIPP schools, which like schools in Finland, have defined what is excellence in teaching and learning. I think you can see from the results that KIPP schools get, how graduates of KIPP schools go to college and succeed in college at higher rates than white, middle class kids. That's because of excellent teaching. So yes, race and class matter. We have to address those issues, and we cannot use that as an excuse for low achievement.

How did Finland manage to elevate the role of teacher in the eyes of the population to something that is not just an honorable profession, but a revered profession, whereas in the United States, teachers are so regularly denigrated?
 
They really think about teachers as scientists and the classrooms are their laboratories. So, as I mentioned -- every teacher has to have a masters degree, and it's a content degree where they're not just taking silly courses on education theory and history. They're taking content courses that enable them to bring a higher level of intellectual preparation into the classroom. That's the first point.

The second point is that they've defined professionalism as working more collaboratively. They give their teachers time in the school day and in the school week to work with each other, to continuously improve their curriculum and their lessons. We have a 19th century level of professionalism here, or worse, it's medieval. A teacher works alone all day, everyday, and isolation is the enemy of improvement and innovation, which is something the Finns figured out a long time ago. Get the teachers out of their isolated circumstances and give them time to work together.

Battle With the Devil: Deliverance

Universal Music accused of using fraudulent DMCA notices as a negotiating tactic in licensing music from other labels

Cory Doctorow

Skepta, a London-based hip-hop artist, uploaded a video for his original song called "Dare to Dream" to YouTube earlier this month. Jimmy Iovine, founder of the Universal-owned label Interscope, heard the song and decided that he'd like to license it for use by Eminem, who is signed to Iovine's label. So far, so good.

But then it gets weird. Iovine reportedly then filed a fraudulent copyright declaration with YouTube, claiming he owned the rights to the song and getting it taken down. Then he approached Skepta and his label to license the song for Eminem's use.

Presumably, the false DMCA declaration -- which is illegal as hell -- was used to prevent competitors from bidding against Iovine, or perhaps to prevent the song from becoming overly associated with Skepta.

Whatever the motivations, this demonstrates the pervading mentality regarding copyright takedowns in entertainment companies: they're handy tools for removing anything you don't like from the Internet for an indefinite period, and there's no penalty for perjuring yourself in your notices.

I'm not sure who has standing to pursue Iovine for his alleged fraud. I fear that the only party situated to bring him to justice are Skepta and his label (who are unlikely to pursue a claim against their new business partner). But I hope that YouTube can -- and does -- take action to produce an object lesson that abusing the law to censor the Internet isn't a consequence-free tactic in the normal course of business, but a crime that undermines copyright law itself.

Suppressed Report Found Busted Pirate Site Users Were Good Consumers

In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.

The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.

Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.

“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.

But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true.

The study, which was carried out by Society for Consumer Research (GfK), found that users of pirate sites including Kino.to did not fit the copyright lobby-painted stereotype of parasites who take and never give back.

In fact, the study also found that Internet users treat these services as a preview, a kind of “try before you buy.”

This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.

“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.

In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.

Obviously it would be of great interest to see the report in full, but it appears that is not going to be possible. According to an anonymous GfK source quoted by Telepolis, the findings of the study proved so unpleasant to the company that commissioned the survey that it has now been locked away “in the poison cupboard.”

GfK says it has a policy of not revealing who they conduct research for if their clients don’t want to be exposed. However, they do carry out research for the movie industry. Telepolis go a stage further and call that work “lobbying”.

The GfK source says that the study shows “If you download films, you have an increased interest in the cinema”, which only highlights how stupid it would be for the authorities to carry out their implied threat of prosecuting Kino.to users.

 

 <but none of this matters because they broke the law... right?>

Can a Playground Be Too Safe?

By JOHN TIERNEY

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

LIVE AND LEARN A bad fall may mean a child is less likely to have a fear of heights later in life.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”

After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights.

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

The old tall jungle gyms and slides disappeared from most American playgrounds across the country in recent decades because of parental concerns, federal guidelines, new safety standards set by manufacturers and — the most frequently cited factor — fear of lawsuits.

Shorter equipment with enclosed platforms was introduced, and the old pavement was replaced with rubber, wood chips or other materials designed for softer landings. These innovations undoubtedly prevented some injuries, but some experts question their overall value.

“There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds,” said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.

“This sounds counterintuitive, but it shouldn’t, because it is a common phenomenon,” Dr. Ball said. “If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don’t understand its properties, they overrate its performance.”

Reducing the height of playground equipment may help toddlers, but it can produce unintended consequences among bigger children. “Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”

Fear of litigation led New York City officials to remove seesaws, merry-go-rounds and the ropes that young Tarzans used to swing from one platform to another. Letting children swing on tires became taboo because of fears that the heavy swings could bang into a child.

“What happens in America is defined by tort lawyers, and unfortunately that limits some of the adventure playgrounds,” said Adrian Benepe, the current parks commissioner. But while he misses the Tarzan ropes, he’s glad that the litigation rate has declined, and he’s not nostalgic for asphalt pavement.

“I think safety surfaces are a godsend,” he said. “I suspect that parents who have to deal with concussions and broken arms wouldn’t agree that playgrounds have become too safe.” The ultra-safe enclosed platforms of the 1980s and 1990s may have been an overreaction, Mr. Benepe said, but lately there have been more creative alternatives.

“The good news is that manufacturers have brought out new versions of the old toys,” he said. “Because of height limitations, no one’s building the old monkey bars anymore, but kids can go up smaller climbing walls and rope nets and artificial rocks.”

Still, sometimes there’s nothing quite like being 10 feet off the ground, as a new generation was discovering the other afternoon at Fort Tryon Park. A soft rubber surface carpeted the pavement, but the jungle gym of Mr. Stern’s youth was still there. It was the prime destination for many children, including those who’d never seen one before, like Nayelis Serrano, a 10-year-old from the South Bronx who was visiting her cousin.

When she got halfway up, at the third level of bars, she paused, as if that was high enough. Then, after a consultation with her mother, she continued to the top, the fifth level, and descended to recount her triumph.

“I was scared at first,” she explained. “But my mother said if you don’t try, you’ll never know if you could do it. So I took a chance and kept going. At the top I felt very proud.” As she headed back for another climb, her mother, Orkidia Rojas, looked on from a bench and considered the pros and cons of this unfamiliar equipment.

“It’s fun,” she said. “I’d like to see it in our playground. Why not? It’s kind of dangerous, I know, but if you just think about danger you’re never going to get ahead in life.”

Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Subpoena To Get An Itemized Bill

I've noticed in the last couple years that major telcos have really ramped up their customer service. I've had very positive exchanges with folks at Sprint and AT&T -- two companies, which used to have reputations for horrible customer service. Sprint, in particular, appears to have made it abundantly clear to customer service agents that they should bend over backwards to help customers. Apparently, Verizon has gone in a different direction. A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information.

Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon to hand over the itemized bill info.

It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.

The judge has also suggested Verizon should be fined $1,000 for its failure here, and that suggestion will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

<what's most interesting here is not the outcome but that they could say such a thing with impunity and suffer no consequences at all>

Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted. He came to that conclusion after redesigning his software, and immediately alerted prosecutors and the police about the mistake, he said.

The finding of 84 visits was used repeatedly during the trial to suggest that Ms. Anthony had planned to murder her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who was found dead in 2008. Ms. Anthony, who could have faced the death penalty, was acquitted of the killing on July 5.

According to Mr. Bradley, chief software developer of CacheBack, used by the police to verify the computer searches, the term “chloroform” was searched once through Google. The Google search then led to a Web site, sci-spot.com, that was visited only once, Mr. Bradley added. The Web site offered information on the use of chloroform in the 1800s.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office had used the software to validate its finding that Ms. Anthony had searched for information about chloroform 84 times, a conclusion that Mr. Bradley says turned out to be wrong. Mr. Bradley said he immediately alerted a prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, and Sgt. Kevin Stenger of the Sheriff’s Office in late June through e-mail and by telephone to tell them of his new findings. Mr. Bradley said he conducted a second analysis after discovering discrepancies that were never brought to his attention by prosecutors or the police.

Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

“I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” Mr. Bradley said. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

Mr. Bradley, chief executive of Siquest, a Canadian company, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to show them the findings.

Cheney Mason, one of Ms. Anthony’s defense lawyers, said it was “outrageous” that prosecutors withheld critical information on the “chloroform” searches.

“The prosecution is absolutely obligated to bring forth to the court any and all evidence that could be exculpatory,” Mr. Mason said. “If in fact this is true, and the prosecution concealed this new information, it is more than shame on them. It is outrageous.”

“This was a major part of their case,” Mr. Mason added.

The State Attorney’s Office in Orlando did not return messages seeking comment.

Capt. Angelo Nieves, media relations commander for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, said Mr. Bradley had a vested interest in coming forward since his software was used in the investigation.

“We’re not going to relive the trial again,” Captain Nieves said. “We are not prepared to do that nor are we going to participate in that.”

A former Canadian police sergeant who specializes in computer forensic analysis, Mr. Bradley said he first became suspicious of the data after he testified on June 8. He said he had been called to testify by the prosecution about his CacheBack software. Instead, he was asked repeatedly about the Sheriff’s Office report detailing the 84 search hits on “chloroform,” which he had not seen.

“I had translated the data into something meaningful for the police,” he said. “Then I turned it over to them. The No. 1 principle for them is to validate the data, and they had the tools and resources to do it. They chose not to.”

Soon after giving testimony, Mr. Bradley learned during the defense portion of the case that the police had written a first report in August 2008 detailing Ms. Anthony’s history of Internet searches. That report used NetAnalysis, a different software.

Despite his appearance as a witness, Mr. Bradley said he was never told about that first report either by the police, with whom he had been in contact, or the prosecution.

Of the search results in both reports relating to chloroform, only one hit was found for sci-spot.com. That site was visited once, according to NetAnalysis, and visited 84 times, according to the CacheBack analysis.

Concerned that the analysis using CacheBack could be wrong and that a woman’s life might be at stake, Mr. Bradley went back to the drawing board and redesigned a portion of his software to get a more accurate picture.

He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. His more thorough analysis showed that the Web site sci-spot.com was visited only once — not 84 times.

Mr. Bradley, fearing that jurors were being given false information based on his data, contacted the police and the prosecution the weekend of June 25. He asked Sergeant Stenger about the discrepancy, and the sergeant said he was aware of it, Mr. Bradley said. He waited to see if prosecutors would correct the record. They did not.

“They needed to get that right,” Mr. Bradley said.

Creative piracy: the movies are free, it's the DVD cases that cost money

By Nate Anderson

 

A small business in Florida recently tried a new twist on piracy: burn DVDs of in-theaters-now Hollywood films and give them away freely to customers who "donate" $5 for an empty DVD jewel case. Hey, it can't be illegal if people aren't paying for the actual movies! (Right?)

The business didn't last long, surviving for a few months in an Orlando shopping mall before an investigator for the MPAA tipped off police. They raided the shop earlier this month when the owner was away and seized a pair of computers, DVD burners, blank discs, and more.
According to the Orlando Sentinel:

Employees at nearby businesses said they didn't know the owner by name, but had seen him recently. They also noticed he posted a large sign on the front door stating movies there were free and were for promotional use only. Any monetary transactions were donations, the sign stated.

The 1709 Copyright Blog, which brought the story to our attention, notes that the store's alleged behavior was clearly illegal under federal law… but the Florida state statutes are a bit ambiguous when applied to this specific case.

A Florida case involving infringing CDs, rather than DVDs, suggests section (3)(a)1 might be applicable here. In that case, it was clear that the CDs themselves were for sale. If the court doesn’t allow the “I’m only selling the jewel cases” line to fly, then this provision could possibly be applicable. The real tricky thing here is that half of the provisions talk about sound recordings and half talk about performances. Neither term is defined and neither obviously covers movies.

Creative, in a rather stupid way—US copyright law gives copyright owners the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute works—but you have to admire the sheer audacity of the scheme.

Grading in American Colleges and Universities

<point being, they're going up roughly at the same rate as stupidity>

Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure

By J. Alex Halderman

I'm pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race.
What makes Telex different from previous approaches:

• Telex operates in the network infrastructure — at any ISP between the censor's network and non-blocked portions of the Internet — rather than at network end points. This approach, which we call “end-to-middle” proxying, can make the system robust against countermeasures (such as blocking) by the censor.
• Telex focuses on avoiding detection by the censor. That is, it allows a user to circumvent a censor without alerting the censor to the act of circumvention. It complements anonymizing services like Tor (which focus on hiding with whom the user is attempting to communicate instead of that that the user is attempting to have an anonymous conversation) rather than replacing them.
• Telex employs a form of deep-packet inspection — a technology sometimes used to censor communication — and repurposes it to circumvent censorship.
• Other systems require distributing secrets, such as encryption keys or IP addresses, to individual users. If the censor discovers these secrets, it can block the system. With Telex, there are no secrets that need to be communicated to users in advance, only the publicly available client software.
• Telex can provide a state-level response to state-level censorship. We envision that friendly countries would create incentives for ISPs to deploy Telex.

For more information, keep reading, or visit the Telex website.

The Problem

Government Internet censors generally use firewalls in their network to block traffic bound for certain destinations, or containing particular content. For Telex, we assume that the censor government desires generally to allow Internet access (for economic or political reasons) while still preventing access to specifically blacklisted content and sites. That means Telex doesn't help in cases where a government pulls the plug on the Internet entirely. We further assume that the censor allows access to at least some secure HTTPS websites. This is a safe assumption, since blocking all HTTPS traffic would cut off practically every site that uses password logins.
Many anticensorship systems work by making an encrypted connection (called a “tunnel”) from the user's computer to a trusted proxy server located outside the censor's network. This server relays requests to censored websites and returns the responses to the user over the encrypted tunnel. This approach leads to a cat-and-mouse game, where the censor attempts to discover and block the proxy servers. Users need to learn the address and login information for a proxy server somehow, and it's very difficult to broadcast this information to a large number of users without the censor also learning it.

How Telex Works

Telex turns this approach on its head to create what is essentially a proxy server without an IP address. In fact, users don't need to know any secrets to connect. The user installs a Telex client app (perhaps by downloading it from an intermittently available website or by making a copy from a friend). When the user wants to visit a blacklisted site, the client establishes an encrypted HTTPS connection to a non-blacklisted web server outside the censor’s network, which could be a normal site that the user regularly visits. Since the connection looks normal, the censor allows it, but this connection is only a decoy.
The client secretly marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers. We construct this tag using a mechanism called public-key steganography. This means anyone can tag a connection using only publicly available information, but only the Telex service (using a private key) can recognize that a connection has been tagged.
As the connection travels over the Internet en route to the non-blacklisted site, it passes through routers at various ISPs in the core of the network. We envision that some of these ISPs would deploy equipment we call Telex stations. These devices hold a private key that lets them recognize tagged connections from Telex clients and decrypt these HTTPS connections. The stations then divert the connections to anti­censorship services, such as proxy servers or Tor entry points, which clients can use to access blocked sites. This creates an encrypted tunnel between the Telex user and Telex station at the ISP, redirecting connections to any site on the Internet.
Telex doesn't require active participation from the censored websites, or from the non-censored sites that serve as the apparent connection destinations. However, it does rely on ISPs to deploy Telex stations on network paths between the censor's network and many popular Internet destinations. Widespread ISP deployment might require incentives from governments.

Development so Far

At this point, Telex is a concept rather than a production system. It's far from ready for real users, but we have developed proof-of-concept software for researchers to experiment with. So far, there's only one Telex station, on a mock ISP that we're operating in our lab. Nevertheless, we have been using Telex for our daily web browsing for the past four months, and we're pleased with the performance and stability. We've even tested it using a client in Beijing and streamed HD YouTube videos, in spite of YouTube being censored there.
Telex illustrates how it is possible to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race, by thinking big about the problem. We hope our work will inspire discussion and further research about the future of anticensorship technology.
You can find more information and prototype software at the Telex website, or read our technical paper, which will appear at Usenix Security 2011 in August.

Midway Police Shut Down Girls' Lemonade Stand for not having a Business License

 Midway police bust none other than a lemonade stand, because the three girls running it didn't have a business license. The three girls thought if they sold enough lemonade, they could make money to go to the water park Splash in the Boro. Well they thought wrong. Midway police say, they're breaking city law and have to go.

“It’s kind of crazy that we couldn’t sell lemonade. It was fun, but we had to listen to the cops and shut it down,” 14-year-old Casity Dixon said.

The girls had only been opened for one day before Midway’s police chief and another officer cruised by and saw the stand.

“They told us to shut it down,” 10-year-old Skylar Roberts said.

“We had told them, we understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law, and we can’t let you do it anymore. The law is the law, and we have to be consistent with how we enforce the laws,” Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar said.

By a city ordinance, the girls must have a business license, peddler’s permit, and food permit to set up shop, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day and a total of $180 per year. City officials said it’s their job to keep everyone safe and healthy, and there can be no exceptions to the rules.

“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance,” Chief Morningstar said.

“It’s almost like they don’t have anything better to do. I’m going to let it go. I’m trying to cheat them good. I don’t think if I keep on, it’ll teach them a good thing,” Amy Roberts said.

So the law wins, and what started out as three girls’ dream of a fun summer business is now just a piece of plywood.

Since the lemonade stand was shut down, the girls have been doing extra chores and yard work to make money for the water park.

Stranger moves into foreclosed home, citing little-knownTexas law

by CASEY NORTON/ WFAA

FLOWER MOUND, Texas - A little-known Texas law and a foreclosure could have a man in Flower Mound living on easy street.

Flower Mound's Waterford Drive is lined with well-manicured $300,000 homes. So, when a new neighbor moved in without the usual sale, mortgage-paying homeowners had a few questions.

"What paperwork is it and how is it legally binding if he doesn't legally own the house?" said Leigh Lowrie, a neighboring resident. "He just squats there."

Lowrie and her husband said the house down the street was in foreclosure for more than a year and the owner walked away. Then, the mortgage company went out of business.

Apparently, that opened the door for someone to take advantage of the situation. But, Kenneth Robinson said he's no squatter. He said he moved in on June 17 after months of research about a Texas law called "adverse possession."

"This is not a normal process, but it is not a process that is not known," he said. "It's just not known to everybody."

He says an online form he printed out and filed at the Denton County courthouse for $16 gave him rights to the house. The paper says the house was abandoned and he's claiming ownership.

"I added some things here for my own protection," Robinson said.

The house is virtually empty, with just a few pieces of furniture. There is no running water or electricity.

But, Robinson said just by setting up camp in the living room, Texas law gives him exclusive negotiating rights with the original owner. If the owner wants him out, he would have to pay off his massive mortgage debt and the bank would have to file a complicated lawsuit.

Robinson believes because of the cost, neither is likely. The law says if he stays in the house, after three years he can ask the court for the title.

He told News 8 his goal is to eventually have the title of the home and be named the legal owner of the home.

"Absolutely," he said. "I want to be owner of record. At this point, because I possess it, I am the owner."

Robinson posted "no trespassing" signs after neighbors asked police to arrest him for breaking in.

Flower mound officers say they can't remove him from the property because home ownership is a civil matter, not criminal.

Lowrie and her neighbors continue to look for legal ways to get him out. They are talking to the mortgage company, real estate agents and attorneys. They're convinced he broke into the house to take possession, but Robinson told News 8 he found a key and he gained access legally.

"If he wants the house, buy the house like everyone else had to," Lowrie said. "Get the money, buy the house."

Robinson said he's not buying anything. As far as he''s concerned, the $330,000 house is already his and he has the paperwork to prove it.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe The Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media

Yet another report: Internet disconnections a "disproportionate" penalty

By Nate Anderson

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with its 56 member countries made up of 1 billion people, is the “world's largest regional security organization.” And it really doesn't like Internet censorship.

A new OSCE report on "Freedom of Expression on the Internet" (PDF) takes a hard line on all things Internet, issuing conclusions at odds with the practices of many of its most powerful member states, including France and the US. Net neutrality? Every country needs it. “Three strikes” laws that and in Internet disconnection? Disproportionate penalties for minor offenses. Internet access? It's a human right.

The report was prepared by Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey, and it's a scorcher—coming to many of the same conclusions reached by UN Special Rapporteur Frank LaRue last month. Reports, even when they come from organizations like OSCE and the UN, seem unlikely to alter France's stance on Internet disconnections as response to online copyright infringement, or the United States' newfound appreciation of the need for Internet site blocking. As for countries like Belarus and Kazahstan—well, the chances they will suddenly agree with Akdeniz and LaRue are infinitesimal.

Still, the reports do document a growing high-level international perspective opposed to nearly all censorship and curtailment of Internet access, and in strong favor of making such access a universal human right.

Highlights from the report:

Network neutrality: It's "an important prerequisite for the Internet to be equally accessible and affordable to all. It is, therefore, troubling that more than 80 percent of the participating States do not have legal provisions in place to guarantee net neutrality. Finland and Norway stand out as best practice examples… Users should have the greatest possible access to Internet-based content, applications or services of their choice without the Internet traffic they use being managed, prioritized, or discriminated against by the network operators."

"Three strikes": "The increased use of so-called 'three-strikes' legal measures to combat Internet piracy is worrisome given the growing importance of the Internet in daily life… This disproportionate response is most likely to be incompatible with OSCE commitment on the 'freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.'"

Internet kill switch: "Existent legal provisions allow several OSCE participating States to completely suspend all Internet communication and 'switch off' Internet access for whole populations or segments of the public during times of war, states of emergency and in cases of imminent threat to national security. Reaffirming the importance of fully respecting the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the OSCE participating States should refrain from developing, introducing and applying 'Internet kill switch' plans as they are incompatible with the fundamental right to information."

Web blocking: "As blocking mechanisms are not immune from significant deficiencies, they may result in the blocking of access to legitimate sites and content. Further, blocking is an extreme measure and has a very strong impact on freedom of expression and the free flow of information. Participating States should therefore refrain from using blocking as a permanent solution or as a means of punishment… Blocking of online content can only be justified if in accordance with these standards and done pursuant to court order and where absolutely necessary. Blocking criteria should always be made public and provide for legal redress."