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But didn't MPAA head Chris Dodd fess up to quid pro quo in 2012?

MPAA seems to disagree:

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

I'm not a fan of the 3 letter agencies, but Jesus H Christ, try to keep it at least plausible.

Fusion centers + parallel construction = police state apologists need to find a new defense for the indefensible.

AT&T has already been given Billions of dollars in tax incentives to deliver fiber optic cable based internet to your house.

According to the incentive plans these high speed internet connections should already be installed and functioning for pretty much every American at speeds averaging 45 Mbps upload and download. Every American taxpayer, that is not a provider of internet infrastructure, has taken on the burden of $2000.00 more in taxes in order to offset the incentives gives to AT&T and the baby bells.

Do you have your low cost, high speed fiber yet?

If like me you want to know what the "procedural mistakes" were, and not read what is almost certainly someone's unnecessary diatribe about why the end result is wrong (hint: it's wrong, so, so wrong, and we all know why), let me help you find them. Use the last link in the summary, copied here:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/06454126931/lavabit-loses-its-appeal-mucking-up-basic-procedural-issues-early.shtml

Summary: The case is about whether Lavabit should have been held in contempt, which hinges upon whether the court had the right to demand what it was demanding. However, Levison did not make any legal argument against the demand at the time. Therefore, it was justifiably held in contempt. The issue of whether the court had the right to demand private keys is important, but the issue needed to be raised sooner and with more force. Now it's irrelevant to further proceedings.

I am not a lawyer and I have not actually finished reading the article yet.

Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress ...

Maybe they weren't idiots. Maybe the were protecting a lucrative after-Congress job market...

Which would hold unless Mulgrew had parts/work. Oh wait, she does! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

And I'm sure that she is being well paid in a timely manner by the most ethical industry in the world so she will never have to worry about not having a steady income.

The part I agree with is that I personally am not concerned whatsoever with the metadata. At all. And the only reason you see most of the media coverage is because folks don't understand what metadata is. If you polled the public right now you would largely find them believing the government is secretly recording and archiving all of our actual phone calls. They aren't.

Sorry, but metadata is all that is needed to invade privacy, and they're collecting it on everyone. It's not okay, okay?

However, it will remain illegal to circumvent DRM. So whilst this law is progress, it's not progressing very far.

> The USA Federal Government has stated that not having a Facebook account is one way to identify a terrorist.
Bullshit.

Not bullshit. The OP is referring to a leaked DHS or FBI powerpoint presentation where they listed things that might be indicators that someone's a "terrorist", and not having a Facebook account was one of the bullet-points. Here's an article for you.

Please. This was debunked already. http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/i... Just for info. Not trying to dispute whether the article refers to a true 'first' or not.

Wow, there is so much wrong in this post I don't even know where to begin.

Let's start with the "claimed and won whistle-blower status". That is completely false. First off, the whistleblower laws only apply to government employees. As a contractor, they did not protect him at all. Second, he is charged under the Espionage Act, which does not have any whistleblower or "public good" exception. People prosecuted under this law are forbidden from telling a jury that they were acting for the greater good, the only thing that the jury is allowed to hear is that the law was broken.

http://www.politifact.com/pund...

Second, as for "the worst thing that could happen to him", consider the prior example of Thomas Drake, who was a whistleblower years before Snowden, followed the letter of the law precisely, and as a result had his house raided by armed FBI agents. They also raided the houses of three other people who knew Drake, the FBI holding the families of these associates at gunpoint. The prosecution of Drake was in fact persecution, as Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court said explicitly when he called it "unconscionable".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

He has not "kept revealing stuff" in order to "keep his value". He gave his documents to a few trusted reporters before he fled, and since he left he has not released a single thing. The continuing revelations are from his original release to the reporters, he is not providing anything new at all. He says he has none of the documents anymore, and the NSA and CIA and FBI have not shown any evidence that he does have them. The intelligence agencies have instead used weasel-words to insinuate that he does without literally accusing him of it.

The collection efforts directed at our allies need to be revealed, because they are part of a larger pattern of flagrant disrespect and veiled acts of war the intelligence agencies are perpetuating universally across the globe. Do you even realize we are talking about universal surveillance of every man, woman, and child on Earth? The reality is far worse than any dystopian science fiction you can find. The NSA is worse than the Stasi, as said by a former Stasi official.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

As for our political and military allies also being economic competitors, how the hell do you justify spending more on our intelligence budget than the rest of the First World nations combined? In what possible way is that an economic advantage?

The worst part of all this is that I cannot ever know for sure if you are simply grossly misinformed, or you are a government shill paid to deliberately post false information in an organized propaganda attempt.

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

You, sir, terrify me almost as much as the totalitarian government intelligence agencies.

The story is that the US Solicitor General (whose office prepared this brief) is a former top lawyer for the MPAA.

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." Obi-Wan Kenobi

They certainly can't say you're not allowed to have a data-capable phone which doesn't have a data plan.

Is that right? I thought that their networks are sufficiently under their control to allow them to exclude whomever (and whatever) they want. Am I wrong?

Perhaps a carrier like T-Mobile ignores out-of-defined-use of smartphones, but do other carriers?

A different article on this story (think it was techdirt) describes the situation:

If a party basically offers to settle for terms that match what it would likely get in a final court ruling, and the other party doesn't accept, courts tend to look very negatively on that situation.

That is "you won, what the heck are you still doing in my courtroom?"

GEMA is, however, entirely responsible for claiming they own the music. In many cases, I bet they don't

If I were a betting man, I'd take that bet without hesitation.

Here you go. You Lose.

Stealth. The Prius is super quiet, I'll sneak up on him.

If a sock puppet follows direction of the classic gov talking points?
http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

You know a secret warrant is called secret for a reason, right?

https://www.aclu.org/support-o...

http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

At least through the mid-late '90s, the American car manufacturers that I dealt with (from the late '80s until then) that were using Motorola MCUs for ECUs had very strict rules that went beyond DO-178B specifically because they were terrified of liability issues (though whether or not this was true in what actually went into production, I can't be certain, just that these were the rules I was told they had to deal with and all our products must supply a way to achieve). I dealt with airline ECUs, also, and never found them to be afraid of caches, for example.

1) no caches, unless the caches could be locked and used effectively as SRAM
2) no DRAM holding any code that was timing dependent (in general, ECUs used only SRAM)
3) the only branch backwards in the code was at the end of the code back to the start of main loop, forget about having function calls.
4) if at any test and set a flag wasn't ready, signal it to be dealt with on the next pass where it could be upgraded to an error
5) any code not written in assembly must be refactored in assembly so that predictable timing could be established
6) in general, everything was polled and interrupts are reserved for panic situations

I did not enjoy working with them and watching them ignore feature after feature that could have improved performance get tossed out the window out of fear or problems that had been pretty completely worked through and resolved before I ever got to college, given enough CPU power and fast enough data paths.

Somewhere around 1994, though, I had the opportunity to start working with the Honda and Ford racing teams, where the culture was understandably different. Able to use 32-bit CPUs to full effect, combined with the 68332's TPU for their timing specific things, allowed them to make the order(s) of magnitude jump in performance to give the soft real time (x can happen before time y, as long as it is guaranteed to happen before time y or a signal is thrown; not the same definition of soft real time everyone uses) approach a fighting chance over the hard real time (x happens at time y, even if delays need to be inserted to make sure that happens; again, not the same definition of hard read time everyone uses) camp. While I am very happy that car manufacturers all seem to have made that jump in every area, knowing that thorough testing of complex code is frequently the first thing management gives short shrift as deadlines approach does keep me open minded to the possibility that software could be the problem in situations like the acceleration issues. I can't recall of a situation where inadvertent acceleration was tracked back to anything ECU related, for what ever that's worth. Other aspects of car management, however...

Since they removed law enforcement from their fact sheet https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

First link, http://www.techdirt.com/articl... [techdirt.com] proves my point. If the government is violating your rights, get a lawyer and appeal. That's what this guy is doing.

Second link, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com] Again proves my point. If the NSA is using data it has collected illegally in criminal trials as evidence, there is redress in court to get the evidence stricken and any convictions based on it overturned.

Third link: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com] is on it's face the most troubling. However, In order for this to be a *real* issue, one must assume that the NSA data was used in collecting the evidence being used in the criminal trial. If such data was not used in the investigation, it is inadmissible and thus the defense is not necessarily entitled to a court order to get it.

You see, in each of these cases, the rules of evidence are being argued over and applied. Which is my point. There is a process here and that process IS fair.

First link, http://www.techdirt.com/articl... [techdirt.com] proves my point. If the government is violating your rights, get a lawyer and appeal. That's what this guy is doing.

Second link, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com] Again proves my point. If the NSA is using data it has collected illegally in criminal trials as evidence, there is redress in court to get the evidence stricken and any convictions based on it overturned.

Third link: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com] is on it's face the most troubling. However, In order for this to be a *real* issue, one must assume that the NSA data was used in collecting the evidence being used in the criminal trial. If such data was not used in the investigation, it is inadmissible and thus the defense is not necessarily entitled to a court order to get it.

You see, in each of these cases, the rules of evidence are being argued over and applied. Which is my point. There is a process here and that process IS fair.

Really? You've *seen* this happen before? (and not on TV, in real life)

http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

As I understand this, legally they have to disclose all evidence they have to the defense period.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

So if they have classified evidence, they have to let the defense have it. Yes, they can have the trial in a closed environment and seal the transcripts, but this is not unfair.

Just keep on spinnin' those wheels, defending a state you know to be corrupt, dude.

Really? You've *seen* this happen before? (and not on TV, in real life)

http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

As I understand this, legally they have to disclose all evidence they have to the defense period.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

So if they have classified evidence, they have to let the defense have it. Yes, they can have the trial in a closed environment and seal the transcripts, but this is not unfair.

Just keep on spinnin' those wheels, defending a state you know to be corrupt, dude.

In the early 2000s, the federal government gave tax breaks to the then-leading communications giants to install an open high-speed data infrastructure throughout the country. The amount of taxes they didn't collect averaged $2,000 per household. Shortly after that, the companies began sales and mergers. TechDirt.com published an article detailing this scam as recently as 2013.

You know, whether you agree or disagree with what Snowden did, that in no way justifies killing him without a... oh, what was that quaint thing we used to require? That's right, a trial. Rule of law, and all that.

If there were to be a trial it is almost certain they would exclude pretty much all avenues of defense that support what he actually did and why. Rule of Law is no more in this country. Just ask Aron Schwartz, Bradley Manning and the host of other whistle blowers prosecuted by the self proclaimed most open administration in history. If they want you gone they simple twist the millions of laws that exist and make up new interpretations if that's not enough. But you will be gone.

AC opined:

They don't delete externally collected data. They obviously delete or age-off internal records.

Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of GCSB said:

This is a spy agency. We don't delete things. We archive them.

Key's office confirmed that Key was talking about the video that his lawyers had claimed was deleted.

AC opined:

Isn't claiming that Dotcom was illegally spied upon putting the cart before the horse here? Where is the evidence? Regardless of whether it was deleted or not, by making the statement one is assuming the conclusion and puts their own credibility at risk.

Here are some links from the fine article showing that the government and the police have already admitted malfeasance:

Police Admit That NZ Spy Agency Illegally Spied On Kim Dotcom

NZ Prime Minister Admits That The Government Illegally Wiretapped Megaupload Employees

Oddly enough you are correct that these admissions of malfeasance do put the credibility of the police and the Prime Minister at risk although that is probably not what you meant.

And in conclusion: FUCK BETA!

AC opined:

They don't delete externally collected data. They obviously delete or age-off internal records.

Prime Minister John Key, who is in charge of GCSB said:

This is a spy agency. We don't delete things. We archive them.

Key's office confirmed that Key was talking about the video that his lawyers had claimed was deleted.

AC opined:

Isn't claiming that Dotcom was illegally spied upon putting the cart before the horse here? Where is the evidence? Regardless of whether it was deleted or not, by making the statement one is assuming the conclusion and puts their own credibility at risk.

Here are some links from the fine article showing that the government and the police have already admitted malfeasance:

Police Admit That NZ Spy Agency Illegally Spied On Kim Dotcom

NZ Prime Minister Admits That The Government Illegally Wiretapped Megaupload Employees

Oddly enough you are correct that these admissions of malfeasance do put the credibility of the police and the Prime Minister at risk although that is probably not what you meant.

And in conclusion: FUCK BETA!

"the legal justification for the NSA's wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer"

It never was there in the first place. They'll just declare some other law sufficient for legitimizing their dragnet collection, have the secret FISA court state for the record that they continue to be utterly out of control and oversight, have this statement be declared a national security secret and that's it.

As long as you feed them the money for doing so, they will continue to crap on people's right. Closing down the toilets will just make them shit in the streets.

The only way to stop their constitutional violations is to pull their funding. Massive dragnet collection and storage needs massive resources. As long as those resources are provided, they will get used for their marked purpose.

As for the rest of your rant^H^H^H^H post, it doesn't really make sense. You believe that a self-signed certificate will somehow "protect" you from the NSA? Who is somehow incapable of a MITM? Well, this, this and this may prove... enlightening. And while we're on the topic of "additional reading", may I also recommend "Alice in Warningland" - a study showing 70+% clickthrough rates for SSL warnings.

There are some other issues, like you mentioning wireless traffic. With WPA2 being the default, and with many modern wireless NICs no longer supporting promiscuous mode, it is often more difficult to sniff wireless traffic than to mount a MITM on a wired network (especially when the target is the victim's router - again, see the links above).

Security means encryption + integrity + authentication. Period. Anything less is no longer secure.

They just don't understand that they have to compete with piracy^H^H^H^H^H^H FREE .

FIFY.

Saying you can't compete with free is saying you can't compete, period.

New Zealand is playing the role of US puppy, as proved the Kim Dotcom house raid, breaking their own laws in the process as anyway the priority was coming from outside.

You won't fix US attitude from outside, and if you really want to run, don't do it to one of its own colonies.

> My understanding is that during a classified, closed door session
> with committeee members, the actual truth came out.

How would you know? The members of the Intelligence Committees are clueless/corrupt, and even less reliable sources of information than the intel brass.

> Sometimes, you are required by law to lie, even to Congress

No. Just, no. Clapper has on numerous occasions refused to answer questions in open sessions while providing the information in closed session (to the same Congressmen, not just committee flunkies).

just like the patriot act. we have the author of the bill running around now stating that he never intended for it to be used in the way its being used. Well if you didnt intend for it to be used in this way, why did you write it in a way that it COULD be used in this way???

To be fair, he didn't. For some rationale, again see Techdirt.. Mike quotes Julian Sanchez with the tweet: "215 allows FBI to get records relevant to an investigation. PCLOB [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board]: NSA program fails on "FBI", "records," "relevant" & "investigation."

This is what "national security" means: Maintaining the political and economic status quo, even against the will of the people.

Since they dropped law enforcement from their mission statement and donned "national security" the FBI won't have to worry about their actions exposed as they directly support de-facto communist corporate interests, not the people or the capitalism we're told is at play.

Think about it: How capitalistic is it to confiscate a bunch of goods to prevent competition? The sportswear price is inflated because the state ensures a monopoly for the normalization the product. Hello, that's communism. In a free market capitalism the cheaper "counterfeits" would compete with the "official" sports gear on price, and quality, allowing the public access to a cheaper product for less money.

The FBI prioritizes copyright issues over missing persons. You live in a corpro-communist dictatorship where your votes don't count.

I do not trust the RNC as much as I do not trust the DNC - but at the very least the RNC is doing something.

Meanwhile ...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Dianne Feinstein still insists to keep all NSA program running !!

You can't use the word Superbowl or even Super Sunday without the NFL wanting some money. People have been calling it the the "Big Game", although the NFL is now trying to trademark that term as well.
http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

Unless you pay the NFL money, if the NFL has their way, we might have to call it
"that game that happens at the end of the season that determines the champion in the sport that uses the brown oblong ball in the US"

Last time I checked, Russia's continual asylum was conditional on not releasing more information,

Easy for him to live up to since he gave the entire trove to Greenwald, et al. Snowden hasn't released anything since, because he doesn't have anything left. Same reason all the talk about the FSB getting access to the files is also baseless speculation.

I would be naive to assume that Greenwald has the only electronic copy of these documents. The speculation is Snowden could have stashed them in other safe places, to which he would have access. I almost guarantee the govt has done an automated search of the popular cloud sharing sites for keywords. The recent rumors that he planned this ahead of time with Russia is most likely wild speculation by an irresponsible congress critter. If the US knew that as fact, they wouldn't have told us.

I was going to wax philosophical about how and where Snowden might have stashed his cache, so to speak.

Then I thought about it, and decided I didn't want to accidentally say something clever that might... compromise his negotiating position. Better safe than sorry, you know?

Now, if you'll excuse me, there seems to be a commotion going on outsi

Last time I checked, Russia's continual asylum was conditional on not releasing more information,

Easy for him to live up to since he gave the entire trove to Greenwald, et al. Snowden hasn't released anything since, because he doesn't have anything left. Same reason all the talk about the FSB getting access to the files is also baseless speculation.

I would be naive to assume that Greenwald has the only electronic copy of these documents. The speculation is Snowden could have stashed them in other safe places, to which he would have access. I almost guarantee the govt has done an automated search of the popular cloud sharing sites for keywords. The recent rumors that he planned this ahead of time with Russia is most likely wild speculation by an irresponsible congress critter. If the US knew that as fact, they wouldn't have told us.

Last time I checked, Russia's continual asylum was conditional on not releasing more information,

Easy for him to live up to since he gave the entire trove to Greenwald, et al. Snowden hasn't released anything since, because he doesn't have anything left. Same reason all the talk about the FSB getting access to the files is also baseless speculation.

Like this possible practice run?

It's not BS.

The USPTO lowered its standards [at the behest of Congress] to lower its standards to reduce its backlog. If an application is denied, it can be refiled [many times]. The only way to truly clear it is to approve it [and toss it into the court system]:
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/i...

$10,000 times 20 is a trivial amount [on a corporate level] compared to an NRE budget for a legit R&D outfit. There seems to be plenty of [unscrupulous] VC money to back such refilings to get something that can be used to [patent] troll others. The first round funding for even a small startup [post angel round] is minimally $10M. This translates into 1,000 refilings.

'Anti-Propaganda' Ban Repealed, Freeing State Dept. To Direct Its Broadcasting Arm At American Citizens

        https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130715/11210223804/anti-propaganda-ban-repealed-freeing-state-dept-to-direct-its-broadcasting-arm-american-citizens.shtml

              For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts.

Just a couple links to more information about the incident on TechDirt and TheWire.

The equivalent to "you don't have anything to hide" response is 100% incorrect. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131126/01352025373/if-you-dont-care-about-nsa-because-you-havent-done-anything-wrong-youre-wrong.shtml That's simply stating that you feel you are not a target at the moment, but that's not to say you can't be completely screwed the second you are the target. So not only is that also a sidetrack, it's wrong.

> Users of Truecrypt should be extra careful of physical security of their systems to prevent investigators from gaining access to the contents of physical memory."

By investigators, do you mean government workers conducting industrial espionage?

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/nsa-busted-conducting-industrial-espionage-in-france-mexico-brazil-and-other-countries.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-04/asio-arrests-key-witness-in-east-timor-spying-scandal/5132954
http://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-spied-on-brazils-government-as-part-of-global-commercial-espionage-campaign/5353642
http://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-spy-agency-helped-bhp-negotiate-trade-deals-20131106-2x1sw.html
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131111/11532125198/australia-spied-japan-to-help-companies-negotiate-trade-deals.shtml
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/12/02/revealed-the-government-agency-stealing-ideas-from-businesses/
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000940560
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits

This has been used on slow news days for years. 2012, 2011, and 2006, for example.

I would juxtapose that with the advertisements these very same businesses often use with "Fake" customers (actors) that claim how great the service is on television and on the radio.

Personally, I'd like to see those responsible in jail for fraud, but that's not how our currently highly libertarian attitude towards business fraud works these days. I can say, that Yelp has not tolerated this.

All my life I've watched TV commercials with blatant deceptions. I believe tolerating such behavior is very bad for our society, but few seem to agree with me. The first one I remember as a kids was Excedrin with an "extra ingredient" to fight headaches. Why not just say "caffeine" unless the intent is to defraud people? People seem to believe defrauding others for profit is not just acceptable, but ethical.