Bradley Manning faces a maximum sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
The trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the internet into a danger zone, legal experts have warned.
Of the 21 counts faced by the army private on Monday, at his trial at Fort Meade in Maryland, by far the most serious is that he knowingly gave intelligence information to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the open information website WikiLeaks. The leaked disclosures were first published by the Guardian and allied international newspapers.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be the foremost liberal authority on constitutional law in the US and who taught the subject to President Barack Obama, told the Guardian that the charge could set a worrying precedent. He said: “Charging any individual with the extremely grave offense of ‘aiding the enemy’ on the basis of nothing beyond the fact that the individual posted leaked information on the web and thereby ‘knowingly gave intelligence information’ to whoever could gain access to it there, does indeed seem to break dangerous new ground.”
Tribe, who advised the department of justice in Obama’s first term, added that the trial could have “far-reaching consequences for chilling freedom of speech and rendering the internet a hazardous environment, well beyond any demonstrable national security interest.”
“Aiding the enemy” carries the death penalty. Though the US government has indicated it will not seek that ultimate punishment, Manning still faces a maximum sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole.
Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 was subjected to an aborted trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War to the New York Times, said that the Manning prosecution was far tougher than anything that he had endured.
“This is part of Obama’s overall policy of criminalising investigative reporting on national security,” he said. “If the government has its way, it will become very hard in future to expose official corruption or disclose information in the public interest other than leaks made by the administration itself.”
Manning’s trial, which is slated to last three months, opens against a backdrop of mounting unease about the increasingly aggressive stance the US government is taking against official leakers. The Obama administration has launched six prosecutions under the Espionage Act, twice as many as all previous presidencies combined, of which only Manning’s has gone to trial.
Obama’s Super Secret Treaty Which Will Push The Deindustrialization Of America Into Overdrive
By Michael, on June 3rd, 2013
Did you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all “Buy American” laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don’t feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending the negotiations. The plan is to keep this treaty secret until the very last minute and then to railroad it through Congress and have it signed into law by October. The treaty is known as “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and the nations that are reported to be involved in the development of this treaty include the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. Opponents of this treaty refer to it as “the NAFTA of the Pacific”, and if it is enacted it will push the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.
The “one world” economic agenda that Barack Obama has been pushing is absolutely killing the U.S. economy. As you will see later in this article, we are losing jobs and businesses at an astounding pace. And each new “free trade” agreement makes things even worse.
For example, just check out the impact that the recent free trade agreement that Obama negotiated with South Korea is having on us…
A 10 percent decline of U.S. exports to Korea
The U.S. trade deficit with Korea has climbed 37 percent
U.S. auto industry has been crippled
Loss of U.S. control where international trade, banking and finance is concerned
A projected 159,000 jobs will be lost
Wait a second – I though that “free trade” agreements were actually supposed to increase exports.
So why have they declined by 10 percent?
Did someone make a really bad deal?
And of course we have all seen the economic devastation that NAFTA has wrought.
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States actually had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
And “free trade” with China has turned out to be a complete and total nightmare as well.
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year.
In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
But instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Barack Obama is pressing for more “free trade” agreements.
The New York Times is calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership “the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995“. It is reportedly going to include a whole host of provisions which would never be able to get through Congress on their own. Even though this treaty will affect all of our daily lives, the Obama administration is keeping this treaty a total secret. In fact, Obama won’t even show it to Congress even though members of Congress have asked repeatedly to see it…
The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October.
Although Congress has exclusive constitutional authority to set the terms of trade, so far the executive branch has managed to resist repeated requests by members of Congress to see the text of the draft agreement and has denied requests from members to attend negotiations as observers — reversing past practice.
While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans’ daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released.
So exactly who in the world does this guy think that he is? Why won’t Obama let us know exactly what is in this treaty?
Fortunately, there have been a few leaks. One thing that we have discovered is that this new treaty would reportedly ban all “Buy American laws“.
That certainly would not be popular if it got out.
The American people wanted nothing to do with the very strict Internet copyright provisions of SOPA and loudly expressed their displeasure to members of Congress.
Unfortunately, now the provisions of SOPA are back. It is being reported that most of the provisions of SOPA have been quietly inserted into this treaty. If this treaty is enacted, those provisions will become law and the American people will not be able to do anything about it.
A draft agreement leaked Wednesday shows the Obama administration is pushing a secretive trade agreement that could vastly expand corporate power and directly contradict a 2008 campaign promise by President Obama. A U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact between the United States and eight Pacific nations would allow foreign corporations operating in the U.S. to appeal key regulations to an international tribunal. The body would have the power to override U.S. law and issue penalties for failure to comply with its ruling. We speak to Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a fair trade group that posted the leaked documents on its website. “This isn’t just a bad trade agreement,” Wallach says. “This is a ‘one-percenter’ power tool that could rip up our basic needs and rights.” [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a controversial trade pact between the United States and eight Pacific nations that until now has remained largely secret. It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. A chapter from the draft agreement leaked Wednesday outlines how it would allow foreign corporations operating in the United States to appeal key regulations to an international tribunal. The body would have the power to override U.S. law and issue penalties for failure to comply with its rulings.
The agreement is being negotiated by the U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk, appointed by President Obama. But the newly revealed terms contradict promises Obama made while running for president in 2008. One campaign document read in part, quote, “We will not negotiate bilateral trade agreements that stop the government from protecting the environment, food safety, or the health of its citizens; [or] give greater rights to foreign investors than to U.S. investors.”
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier leaks from the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement exposed how it included rules that could increase the cost of medication and make participating countries adopt restrictive copyright measures.
No one from the U.S. trade representative’s office was able to join us, but in a statement to Democracy Now!, they said, quote, “Nothing in our TPP investment proposal could impair our government’s ability to pursue legitimate, non-discriminatory public interest regulation.”
For more, we’re joined by Lori Wallach, director of the fair trade group Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. The leaked documents were posted on her organization’s website early Wednesday morning.
Lori, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain what the documents show and what this agreement is about.
LORI WALLACH: Well, it’s been branded as a trade agreement, but really it is enforceable corporate global governance. The agreement requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures to what are 26 chapters of very comprehensive rules, only two of which have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters set a whole array of corporate new privileges and rights and handcuff governments, limit regulation. So the chapter that leaked—and it’s actually on the website of Citizens Trade Campaign, it’s a national coalition for fair trade—that chapter is the chapter that sets up new rights and privileges for foreign investors, including their right to privately enforce this public treaty by suing our government, raiding our Treasury, over costs of complying with the same policies that all U.S. companies have to comply with. It’s really outrageous.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Lori, there’s been a quite a bit of complaint, even in Congress, about the secretive nature of these continuing negotiations. About 600 or so corporate advisers have access to information that even members of Congress don’t? Could you talk about how that has come about?
LORI WALLACH: Well, this is how you get a text and in a potential agreement that is this outrageous. I mean, this isn’t just a bad trade agreement, this is a one-percenter power tool that could rip up our basic needs and rights. How that happens is the negotiations have been done in total secrecy. So, for two-and-a-half years, until this leak emerged, people have suspected what’s going on, because, as you said, under U.S. law there are 600 official advisers, they have security clearance to see the text, they advise the U.S. position. Meanwhile, the senator, Ron Wyden, who is the chairman of the trade committee in the Senate, the committee with jurisdiction over the TPP, has been denied access to the text, as has his staff, who has security clearance, to a point where this man who has supported agreements like this in the past has filed legislation demanding he have the right to see the agreement that he’s supposed to be having oversight with. He’s on the Intelligence Committee, and he has security clearance, so he can see our nuclear secrets. He just can’t see this corporate bill of rights that is trying to be slipped into effect in the name of being a trade agreement. It’s a very elegant Trojan horse strategy. You brand it one thing, and then you put an agenda that could not survive sunshine into this agreement.
We have been able also to get some of the texts on patents, expanding patents for Big Pharma, jacking up medicine prices. And we have analysis on our website, tradewatch.org, as well as information about how to get involved, because these agreements are a little bit like Dracula. You drag them in the sunshine, and they do not fare well. But all of us, and also across all of the countries involved, there are citizen movements that are basically saying, “This is not in our name. We don’t need global enforceable corporate rights. We need more democracy. We need more accountability.”
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach—
LORI WALLACH: And this agreement is the antithesis.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to read part of the comment we got from the U.S. trade representative’s office when we invited them on today’s show. They wrote, quote, “The Obama Administration has infused unprecedented transparency into the TPP negotiations. We have worked with Members of Congress … [and] invited stakeholders to every round of negotiations where they have given presentations and met with individual negotiating teams. … We are always looking for ways to enhance provisions on transparency and public participation.” Lori Wallach, your comment?
LORI WALLACH: Well, to start with, the idea of transparency of the current negotiators is a one-way mirror. We can basically talk to them and do presentations. But as this leak shows, nothing that the public interest organizations—and it’s a huge array of organizations, from faith groups to consumer groups, environmental, labor—nothing that we have said is now reflected in the U.S. position in this negotiation, which I’m sad to say is the most extreme. I mean, the U.S. is even opposing proposals in this agreement to try and make sure countries have the ability to use financial regulation to ensure financial stability. The U.S. positions don’t reflect what we’ve been saying, but we can talk at them.
But just to put this in perspective, in the last negotiation of a big regional agreement—that was the Free Trade Area of the Americas in the 1990s, 34 countries, very complicated agreement—two years into the negotiation, the entire draft text was published officially by the governments. Here we are, three years into this negotiation with eight countries, and they will not publish a sentence. In fact, it finally leaked that they had signed a special agreement not to release any draft text for four years after negotiations are done—a secrecy agreement on top of the normal secrecy. And when asked, Ron Kirk, the trade representative, why—in the past, the U.S. has sent out draft texts. The WTO, hardly a paradigm of transparency, publishes draft texts. “What the—what’s going on?” he was asked. He said, “Well, in the past, for instance, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, when the text was revealed, we couldn’t finish it.” Now, what sort of indictment is that of what they are doing behind closed doors, that merely allowing the public who will live with the results and Congress to know what’s up is going to somehow derail the plans to lock us in? Because what’s really important to understand about these agreements, it’s not about trade, and it’s like cement. Once the cement dries in these agreements, you can’t change the rules, unless all the agreement—all the other countries agree to amend the agreement.
So what we’re talking about with this leaked chapter is literally a parallel system of justice. People have domestic laws and courts, trying to defend our rights and get our needs met. Corporations would have a parallel system of private attorneys, three of them, no conflict-of-interest laws. The U.S. and the other countries would submit themselves to the jurisdiction of this corporate kangaroo court, and these three random attorneys would have the right to order the U.S. government to pay unlimited amounts of our tax dollars to corporations and investors who, A, claim regulatory costs need to be refunded, or, B, are saying they’re not being treated well enough, regardless if the policies they dislike are the exact same ones that apply to all of us. Even under NAFTA’s system, which has some of this, $350 million have already been paid out to corporations by governments, over toxics bans, zoning laws, timber rules. This is a sneaky outrage. And if people actually put a spotlight on it, we can stop it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Lori, I wanted to ask you—you mentioned the eight nations that are involved in the negotiations. Which nations are they? And also, the issue of the way this is being negotiated, the number could expand dramatically in the future. Can you talk about that?
LORI WALLACH: Well, the reason why it is so incredibly important that this agreement be exposed is this could well be the last agreement that’s negotiated. So, many of your listeners and viewers have been involved in the sneaky way trade agreements have been used by corporations to limit regulation and to foster a race to the bottom since NAFTA. And each of these agreements has gotten bolder, more expansive in its limits on government regulation and in its granting of corporate powers. This one could be the end, because what they intend to do is leave it open, once it’s done, for any other country to join. So, this is an agreement that ultimately could have the whole world in it as a set of binding corporate guarantees of new rights and privileges, enforced with cash sanctions and trade sanctions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the TPP threatens to become a regime of binding global governance, right at the time that the Occupy movement and movements around the world are demanding more power and control. This is the fightback. This is locking in the bad old way plus. And in addition, the way that the agreement is being negotiated, these rules would require that you not only change all of your existing laws—so good progressive laws would have to be gotten rid of—but that, in the future, you don’t create new laws.
Now, the agreement now includes Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam, as well as the U.S., plus Malaysia has now joined. And the agreement includes all of the NAFTA-style privileges that promote offshoring. But more drastically, it has all sorts of new corporate privileges, so the right to extend medicine and seed monopolies to jack up medicine prices, even the right to challenge formularies, medicine prescription group buying plans. For instance, what the Obama administration has put in their health reform bill, they are at the negotiating table behind closed doors trying to kill the right to use for other countries. Or the financial rules would have just a limit. Countries aren’t allowed to ban risky financial products or services, at the same time that we’re trying to issue regulations under financial reform. And the agreement even meddles with how we spend our local tax dollars. For folks around the country who are doing sweat-free campaigns, who are doing living wage campaigns, green buying campaigns, this agreement says, A, you can’t have local preferences, so no “buy New York” state preference to recycle money back in your state, your tax dollars, no “buy American,” but also conditions like a product has to have recycled content or that that uniform has to be sweat-free. Those kind of conditions can be challenged. It is an incredible corporate power tool. It’s only gotten this far because it’s been secret. And people in the other countries don’t want it either. But our country is the one that’s largely pushing the most radical provisions, which is why it was so important for this text, which everyone can see an analysis of at tradewatch.org, to be made public, to make people aware of what’s really going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori, the last round of negotiations on the trade agreement took place in Dallas. While there, Obama’s appointed trade representative, Ron Kirk, spoke at an event for the local business community. The Yes Men took the opportunity to present Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, with a mock award. This is a clip.
GIT HAVERSALL: Hello. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Git Haversall. And on behalf of the Texas Corporate Power Partnership, we are very, very pleased to announce that the U.S. trade negotiators are the winners of our 2012 Corporate Power Tool Award. I would like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a great way for us to maximize our profits, regardless of what the public of this nation or any other nation thinks is right.
AMY GOODMAN: The next round of negotiations on TPP are scheduled over the July 4th holiday weekend. Lori Wallach, can you comment on this? And also, what I assume would be President Obama’s response, if talking behind the scenes, like perhaps tonight when he’s going to be at Sarah Jessica Parker house with—with raising a lot of money—the financial sector is donating $37 million to Mitt Romney so far, the Obama administration’s haul, $4.8 million—that even his own Wall Street supporters are going over to Romney right now, so he would say he is doing better than Romney would in trying to take on these guys.
LORI WALLACH: I think that, for President Obama, there are two scenarios. One is, he has not been on top of what these negotiators are doing. This really has been under the radar. It’s so important that the text finally came out, because it sends a warning to Congress, to the public, etc., and that basically he’s got negotiators on the loose. They are many of the same people who during the Clinton administration got us into NAFTA, that recycled back into the trade negotiating team. The other alternative explanation is just the money one, which is, it is the case that this is an agreement the 1 percent loves. This is sort of one-percenter fantasy. It’s not just that on the margins and in national governments you have to keep fighting with all your money and lobbying to try and get what you want; this would lock it in for the future, indefinitely.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, we want to thank you very much for being with us, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. And we will continue to watch this.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, whistleblower Jesselyn Radack on what a number in Congress are calling national security leaks. Stay with us.
Abby Martin speaks to the legislative representative for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Mike Dolan, about the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama administration’s efforts for a new trade agreement with the EU, and the negative implications of said agreements.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.
Michelle Starr is the tiger force at the core of all things. She also writes about cool stuff and apps as CNET Australia’s Crave editor. But mostly the tiger force thing.
The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property has submitted a report to the US Congress proposing anti-piracy measures and is considering the government-sanctioned use of ransomware.
According to studios and publishers, piracy constitutes a massive threat to both jobs and economies. yet, there is no good way to combat the practice — at least, not within the current scope of US law.
The use of malware is therefore what the commission, a committee formed to investigate, document and come up with ideas for fighting piracy, is considering, as spotted by Lauren Weinstein. In an 89-page report submitted to US Congress, it has detailed how “IP theft” worth “hundreds of billions of dollars per year” hurts the US economy, and proposed measures for fighting it — including the covert installation of spyware:
While not currently permitted under US law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defence that allows companies not only to stabilise a situation, but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder’s networks or even destroying the information within an unauthorised network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system’s camera, implanting malware in the hacker’s network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker’s own computer or network.
US Congress should legalize attacking hacker’s computers with malware, physically destroy networks and take photos of data thieves and copyright violators with their own cameras in order to punish IP thieves, the IP Commission recommends.
The commissioners – former US government officials and military men – say that the “scale of international theft of American intellectual property (IP) is unprecedented”. However, the US government response has been “utterly inadequate to deal with the problem.”
“Almost all the advantages are on the side of the hacker; the current situation is not sustainable,” the commissions’s report says.
“New options need to be considered,” the authors call, then adding that current laws are limited and “have not kept pace with the technology of hacking.”
Thus, the commission suggests allowing active network retrieving stolen information, “altering it within the intruder’s networks, or even destroying the information within an unauthorized network.”
For example, locking down the computer of unauthorized users and forcing them to come out to police could be one of the options.
“The file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account,” the commission recommended.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.
Several major ISPs embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with an adult film copyright holder are appealing a ruling in the case that could permit hundreds of innocent subscribers to be harassed by copyright trolls.
The reversal was requested in papers [PDF] filed last week in the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia by Cox Communications; Bright House Networks, which is owned by Time Warner; and Verizon.
Wants subscriber names
In the case—AF Holdings v. Does 1-1058 and Cox Communications, et. al.—the copyright holders allege that 1058 “John Does” engaged in file-sharing through BitTorrent of a sexually explicit film.
As part of the discovery process in the case, AF Holdings wants Cox and the other ISPs to turn over to them personal information on the John Does. The order came from a federal district court judge, Beryl A. Howell, a former lobbyist for the RIAA and Senate staffer who worked on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law aimed to protect the rights of copyright holders in cyberspace.
Judge Beryl A. Howell
The ISPs are asking the appeals court to overturn Howell’s decision ordering the disclosure of subscribers’ names as part of evidence discovery.
According to the ISPs, AF Holdings and its attorneys aren’t interested in obtaining the names of the alleged infringers to pursue their case in court, but in order to squeeze settlement money from the subscribers.
By Vicki Needham and Peter Schroeder – 04/22/13 06:58 PM ET
TUESDAY’S BIG STORY:
Online tax bill on the move: The Senate overwhelmingly agreed, 74-20, on Monday to end debate on a bill that would allow states to tax online purchases from Internet retailers located outside their borders, seemingly setting up passage of the bill as early as Tuesday.
Despite the support in the upper chamber, the bill could face resistance in the House. So far, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has said he is going to take a close look at the legislation before giving it an all-clear.
Meanwhile, the White Housegave the legislation a thumbs-up on Monday with Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, saying the bill would put online retailers on the same footing with businesses that have a physical presence in states.
“This administration has carefully considered the legislation, and our team has met with a broad array of people on the issue,” Carney said. “And we have heard overwhelmingly from governors, mayors and the business community on the need for federal legislation to level the playing field for our businesses and address sales tax fairness.”
Under current law, states can only collect sales taxes from retailers with a physical presence. Consumers using the Internet to buy goods are supposed to declare the purchases on their tax forms, although few follow through. Some online businesses have begun to voluntarily add the state taxes.
The Supreme Court ruled more than two decades ago that companies only have to collect from in-state customers, but also said that Congress could weigh in on the issue.Retail groups have long supported the issue and put their weight behind the measure, propelling it to this point.
Supporters say that the proposal could give billions in extra revenue to struggling state and local governments. The bill would also exempt small businesses with less than $1 million in out-of-state sales.
Senate Majority Whip DickDurbin (D-Ill.), who has been pressing for passage of the bill for at least two years, said the bill is needed to help states refill their coffers depleted by a lingering economic downturn.
“What it means is a lot of money for the states and localities,” he said.
Still, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Monday that the online sales tax bill would create a new tax and leads America down a “dark path.”
Supporters’ efforts were revived by a vote last month on the Senate’s budget proposal in which 75 senators voted in support of the plan, giving them the go-ahead to press for a quick resolution of the bipartisan bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced last week he planned to bring the bill straight to the floor, bypassing the Senate Finance Committee and setting the stage for a vote.
The bill still needs to pass the Senate and get Obama’s signature before becoming law
By Grant Gross, IDG News Service
April 18, 2013 02:30 PM ET
inShare0
IDG News Service – The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to approve a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill, despite opposition from the White House and several privacy and digital rights groups.
The House on Thursday voted 288-127 to approve the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to share cyberthreat information with private companies. It would also shield private companies that voluntarily share cyberthreat information with each other and with government agencies from privacy lawsuits brought by customers.
The bill would still need to be passed by the U.S. Senate before heading to President Barack Obama for his signature. The Senate declined to act on another version of CISPA during the last session of Congress, and earlier this week, Obama’s advisors threatened a veto, although that was before the House approved a handful of amendments intended to address privacy concerns.
CISPA would allow private companies to share a broad range of customer data with each other and with government agencies, privacy groups have complained.
Supporters, however, argued the legislation is needed to encourage better information sharing about active cyberattacks, resulting in better defense of U.S. networks. Federal law now prohibits intelligence agencies from sharing classified cyberthreat information with private companies.
The bill will help protect the U.S. against cyberattacks from China, Iran and other countries, supporters said. Cyberespionage has cost the U.S. tens of thousands of jobs, as foreign companies steal the blueprints of U.S. products, said Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and primary sponsor of CISPA.
“If you want to take a shot across China’s bow, this is the answer,” he said to applause on the House floor.
The bill correctly balances privacy concerns with the need for security, added Representative Dan Maffei, a New York Democrat. Rogue nations and “even independent groups like WikiLeaks” are taking aggressive measures to attack the U.S. power grid, air-traffic control systems and customer financial data, he said.
“Every day, international agents, terrorists and criminal organizations attack the public and private networks of the United States,” he said. “While I do always have some concern that the U.S. government may access our private information in the cyber sphere, I am more concerned that the Chinese government will access our private information.”
The House on Thursday voted for a handful of amendments to the bill intended to improve privacy protections in the bill. Lawmakers approved an amendment designating the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Justice as the primary repositories of cybertheat information shared by private companies, addressing a concern by several privacy groups that CISPA would give the U.S. National Security Agency unfettered access to customer data.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:05am
We’ve written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we’re posting in more depth about its shortcomings. Information sharing isn’t offensive per se; it’s really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. First up:
What information does CISPA allow companies to share?
The short answer: any information that “pertains” to cybersecurity, broadly defined to include vulnerabilities, threat information, efforts to degrade systems, attempts at unauthorized access, and more. You can see the full list on page 20 of the bill. You’ll see that it’s not tied to the criminal definition of hacking but instead forges new ground.
The bill sponsors will tell you that CISPA is only about the “ones and zeroes,” but it certainly isn’t drafted that way. There’s nothing limiting CISPA in that manner and personally identifiable information (PII) could be shared right along with some inconsequential code that doesn’t impact privacy at all. So, if your communications or records are somehow caught up in a cybersecurity data dump, they might possibly include information that identifies the real-world you, even if that information is not necessary to combat a cyber threat. Under CISPA, you’ll just have to trust that the corporations holding your very personal information do what’s best. Good luck with that.
This serves as a strong warning to those who value their anonymity. If you aren’t already accessing the Internet through VPN or another deidentifying service, you may be ‘on the list.’ Go silent today! VPN is one effective option. I use TOR. VPN will allow you to use some services that TOR blocks to protect you, but VPN costs money and TOR is free.
Important Message From JWR: The FBI’s Cookie Caper and the VPN Imperative
It has just come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, a sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees were surreptitiously collecting the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months before we moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.
I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers. So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.
Working on my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some cached version histories. (Just about everything is available on the Internet, and the footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are essentially there for a lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the FBI redirects were selected because of a reader’s association with “Intellectual Property” infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload. But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie. However, some of these were direct connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4% of the total.) So if they had kept this practice up long enough and if you visited us enough times then the FBI’s computers would have given you a cookie. This has been verified with sniffer software.
Bad Cop, No Cookies
For your privacy, I strongly recommend that you disable cookies when web browsing. Here are some detailed instructions on how to do so for the most popular web browsers:
•Disabling Cookies in MS Internet Explorer
•Disabling Cookies in Firefox
•Disabling Cookies in Safari
•Disabling Cookies in Netscape
•Disabling Cookies in Google Chrome
•Disabling Cookies in Opera
•Disabling Cookies in Konqueror
But beyond that, more must be done to protect your privacy. You need to be proactive.
Install and Use VPN!
I am now imploring all SurvivalBlog readers to immediately install and use Virtual Private Network (VPN) on their computers. This will allow you to surf the Internet anonymously. Anyone that tries to track web site visitors e-mails will see your visit as originating from one of dozens of anonymous URLs in Europe, or elsewhere in the United States. (With most VPN services, you may pick the city of your choice.) With VPN active, your connection to the Web is “tunneled”, emerging at a far-distant IP address, and it it would be very difficult to track back to your home IP address. Setting up VPN takes just a few minute to accomplish. Once installed, you can set VPN to turn on automatically by default when you start your PC, Mac, or Linux computer. Most VPN providers charge $5 to $20 per month. You can toggle off VPN with the click of your mouse. (You will find this necessary if you visit any of the few web site that disallow overseas IP addresses, such as Netflix). But I recommend that you leave VPN turned on, as much as possible. Set it up to turn on each time that you start up your computer. It is crucial that you use VPN whenever you visit web sites, blogs, and forums that are deemed politically incorrect, or whenever you purchase storage food or firearms accessories on the Web. For those of you that are not tech savvy, ask a friend or relative under age 25 to set up VPN for you. It is not difficult.
Some recommended VPN service providers include:
StrongVPN ($55 to $240 per year. One of the most flexible in reassigning the far end of your tunnel on the fly. Superior speed.)
(Some reviews of the various services are available here. )
Note that some of the lower cost services might see your connection speed suffer. Your Internet connect will seem noticeably slower than using your original ISP, alone.
It is my hope that in the next two months SurvivalBlog’s site visit map will shift substantially, giving the appearance that most of my readership has moved to Switzerland. Say “Ein Glück, dass wir den los sind” to the FBI’s snooping! It would warm my heart to soon see SurvivalBlog ranked as one of the most popular web sites for readers with Swiss IP addresses.
Beyond VPN
Because government agencies have access to lots and lots of computing power, VPN is not completely impenetrable. It is vulnerable to penetration during the key exchange phase. With the resources available to a state actor, sniffing the entirety of the traffic into and out of a web site is trivial these days. (They can use massively scalable horizontally-scaled virtual sniffers — i.e. using a visualization engine and a template they can keep adding more virtualized instances of a windows or Linux based sniffer program and not even impact the performance of the connections.) I believe that the next loop of the threat spiral in the privacy wars will be Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). But I must clarify that this will become important only for the most high profile media commentators, bloggers, and activists. This is because all the spook legions with all of the mainframe computers in the world simply cannot backtrack everyone’s VPN tunnels. (And, as VPN becomes more and more popular, this supposed goal will become even more elusive.) And if you are high profile, don’t worry. Some very bright people are already working on QKD. Stay tuned.
Our Liberty is Stake
I want apologize for the cost, inconvenience and time required in implementing the foregoing security measures. But you can sleep a little better, knowing that you’ve added a layer of anonymity to your Internet presence. We need to recognize that the early 21st Century is a delicate time for individual liberty. Technology is leapfrogging while at the same time databases are filling at an alarming rate. These databases could provide dossiers on demand, for nefarious purposes. How you vote and how you “vote with your feet” (physically or virtually) are both of tremendous importance. Pray hard. Choose wisely. Act accordingly.
P.S.: For those who are web software savvy, I had originally planned to post the latest version of the actual “foresee-alive.js” Javascript code that the FBI used to attach the cookies. But then it was pointed out to me that ironically, revealing this might constitute copyright infringement, opening me up to a intellectual property lawsuit. That has an odd sort of irony that got me thinking. This predicament somehow dovetails with two bits of history. The first instance is from the First World War: I have read that the U.S. Government paid patent license fees to Mauser before and during the hostilities of the Great War with Imperial Germany. This was because the M1903 Springfield rifle was correctly adjudged a patent infringement on the Mauser Model 1898. During the war, the patent payments continued, conveniently handled by Swiss bankers, acting as middlemen. The U.S. taxpayers paid Mauser of Germany about $1 per rifle plus additional penalties that would have eventually totaled $250,000 USD, up until the U.S. entered the war. It has also been rumored that some payments continued to arrive even after the U.S. Congress declared war on the Kaiser’s Germany. (We’ll have to wait for the release of Jon Speed’s next Mauser book to read the details.) This historical tidbit is just once notch below what happened two decades later when Germany’s Nazi regime had the temerity to sell full fare train tickets to some Jews, to cover the costs of their forced relocation to the designated ghettos before their planned extermination. Oh, but the Nazi bureaucrats were so conciliatory. They only charged children half fare to be sent to their deaths. (If you doubt this, then read the book Fathoming the Holocaust by Ronald J. Berger.)
Web users’ online communications may be about to get a wider and possibly unwanted audience. The FBI is seeking more powers to spy on people’s emails and internet chats in real time. The proposals have already been met with criticism, that they are a complete breach of privacy. RT’s Marina Portnaya reports.
This is my eighth year as a full time Internet activist. The longer I’m fighting this “War on Evil”, the more I’m concerned with the effectiveness of resistance. No matter what our cause, liberty, false-flag terrorism, free Palestine, debt-free currency, New World Order, Illuminati, chemtrails, vaccination, cancer cures, drug prohibition, or historic revisionism, we must first and foremost make a conscience decision about what’s more important to us, being right or resisting effectively.
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A demonstration in support of Bradley Manning at Fort Meade in Maryland. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images 
By Michael, on June 3rd, 2013
(Pirate flag image by 
