hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1080.txt

Episode: 1080
Title: HPR1080: TGTM Newscast for 9/19/2012 DeepGeek 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1080/hpr1080.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:35:17

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You're listening to Talk Geek To Me News, number 76, record for Wednesday September 19,
2012.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition to get the full podcast
including political, commentary, and other controversial topics.
Please visit www.talkgeektme.us.
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My username there is DG-T-G-T-M as in DeepGeek Talk Geek to me.
Before I start on the technology roundup, I want to first note that announcement has come
in to TG-T-M offices that from the Debian Development Project, that's Tribler, a Python-based
BitTorrent Internet TV application, which we've mentioned in our coverage of new and
exciting BitTorrent clients that we pick up green mostly from TURNFREAK.com has been
added to the Debian Unstable Archive.
Bug Fixing and its movement into a testing branch of the Debian Repository would trigger
a huge availability for end users for this interesting and innovative client.
Now the tech roundup.
From EFF.org by Hany Fakuri, date September 14, 2012, update New York Judge tries to
silence Twitter and its ongoing battle to protect user privacy.
This morning rather than face contempt charges, Twitter headed over the data, requested by
the government, under seal, to the New York Criminal Court.
Twitter was faced with a terrible choice between giving ground on its fight for user privacy
or risk a potentially expensive, contemptive court citation, according to reports at
the hearing, Judge Scarino said Friday that he will keep the record sealed, at least
until September 21, hopefully this will give Twitter and Harris enough time to take
this to a high level court, and make sure that this judge's dangerous decision gets
a thorough review before it's too late.
This ongoing battle to demand that law enforcement requests sensitive user information with
a search warrant rather than a subpoena has taken a strange and dangerous turn, an ill-advised
order from the judge presiding over the case means that either Twitter must disclose
data without a warrant or risk a potentially expensive contemptive court citation.
Malcolm Harris is charged in a New York City Criminal Court with the trivial crime of disorderly
contact, which carries a maximum punishment of a 250-thalafine or 15 days in jail.
In connection with an Occupy Wall Street protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October of 2011,
prosecutors sent a subpoena to Twitter seeking three months' worth of information it had
on Harris, including contacts, tweets, and IP address information Twitter stores when
a person locks into the service, and which can be used to link a user to a specific location.
This challenged a subpoena, but New York City judge Matthew Scarino, Jr. ruled that Harris
had no standing to contest the subpoena because he didn't own his data, Twitter did.
Thankfully, Twitter stepped up and challenged a subpoena itself, and together with the ACLU
and public citizen, we support Twitter with an amicus brief.
Judge Scarino, however, denied Twitter's motion to squash, and instead ordered to turn
over the information to the government.
Twitter continued standing up for a user privacy and appealed the order to the New York
Appell Court, and we continued to support them with another amicus brief.
Unfortunately, Judge Scarino has now tried to stop Twitter's challenge to his order
disclosing the information.
First, he denied Twitter's request to delay disclosure until the case found its way through
the appellate process.
Then he threatened to hold Twitter in contempt of court, if it didn't turn over the data
to the government by Friday, September 14th.
And to put further pressure on Twitter, it ordered it to disclose its earning statements
for the last two quarters, and ordered to determine an appropriate fine.
Of course, if Twitter were to disclose Harris's information to the DA, the privacy damage
would be done.
The government would likely argue that this moots the appeal, and use that as a basis
to prevent the appeals court from ruling on the important legal issues.
Having Twitter between Iraq turned the data over without a warrant, and a hard place
beheld contempt of court and phased up potentially expensive fine before the complicated legal
issues at stake have been resolved by the appeals court, is a mischarriage of justice.
If Judge Scarino is worried that Twitter is making a mountain out of a molehill by continuing
to press its challenge to the subpoena, the same has to be asked of the prosecutors who
are using the misdemeanor disorderly conduct arrest that occurred more than a year ago, as
a pretense to obtain a wealth of information.
The attempt to obtain this information from Twitter is to prove a point not even really
contested, where the Harris was on the bridge during the protest.
The case was shaping up to be a constitutional showdown on a contested and unclear area
of the law.
Judges of much higher up to judicial chain have been wrestling, with the complicated
issues brought about by the explosion of information turned over to third parties, and
her concurring opinion in the United States versus Jones, Justice Sotomayor of the US Supreme
Court wrote that she, quote, would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed
to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentile to
fourth amendment protection, unquote.
If a Supreme Court Justice is thinking about the issues here, why would a state trial
court force Twitter into a position where it has to abandon its court case seeking clarity
or risk a massive fine in deciding to pursue its appeal?
Some have already questioned where the Judge's Carino is the right judge to pass on this
landmark case.
No matter what Twitter does, it will lose.
At a time when companies need to feel empowered to stand up for user privacy, Judge's
Carino's actions have made it difficult for Twitter to do that.
We urge companies not to falter in the face of the setback and continue to fight for the
users.
And just as continues, as mega-upload user debt and negotiations go bust.
Almost nine months have passed since mega-upload servers were traded by the US government, yet
after all this time there is no agreement on how former users can retrieve their files.
Meanwhile, mega-uploads, 113 servers, are gathering dust at Carpathia hosting in the United States.
And the scenes, representatives for mega-upload, have been negotiating with the Department
of Justice and other parties to allow the sites former users to temporarily gain access
to the files, but thus far without result.
After initial negotiations failed early this year, one of mega-uploads users, lost patients
and decided to take action, helped by the EFF, small business on a Kyle Goodwin filed
a motion demanding that the court find a workable solution for the return of his data, and
that of other former mega-upload users.
However, Judge Liam O'Grady didn't want to take a decision on the issue and during
a July hearing he or the various parties to start negotiating again.
Fast forward, another two months, and these negotiations have failed once more.
This means that mega-uploads user data is still in limbo, hoping to come to a solution
that EFF saw no other option than to go back to Judge O'Grady.
Those weren't nowhere, which is why we went back to ask the judge again for the return
of user data, EFF Attorney Julie Samuels told Tornfreak, but O'Grady appears to be taking
his time and weeks have now gone by without an update in the case.
We're all waiting to hear from the judge until the court does something our hands are
unfortunately tied, Samuel says.
According to mega-upload's defense team, US authorities are ultimately to blame for
depriving former mega-upload users from accessing their files.
By taking offline the entire mega-upload cloud storage site, the US Attorney's Office
has demonstrated that they favor the Hollywood oligopoly over innocent customers who lost
access to their data, mega-upload lawyer Ira Rothkin told Tornfreak.
We believe the government's aggressive conduct violates due process Rothkin ads.
Together with the EFF, mega-upload is now hoping that Judge O'Grady will come up with a
quick and workable solution for the possible return of user data.
In addition, mega-upload is hoping that the judge will dismiss the entire case against
the cloud storage company.
We are looking forward to the US federal court ruling on the consumer data access issues
and mega-upload's motion to dismiss, says Rothkin.
The greater the delay, the greater the injustice mega-upload lawyer adds.
Capatia hosting did not respond to our inquiries, but there is little doubt that they are in
favor of a quick solution.
The company currently pays $9,000 per day out of their own pockets to keep the mega-upload
servers intact.
From Tornfreak.com, by our yesterday at September 12, 2012, no due to secure Wi-Fi from BitTorn
Pirates Judge Rules.
BitTornate lawsuits have been dragging on for more than two years in the US involving
more than a quarter million alleged illicit file sharers.
The copyright holders who stored these cases generally provide nothing more than an IP
address as evidence, then ask courts to grant a subpoena which allows them to request
the personal details of the alleged offenders from their internet providers.
The problem with the scheme, however, is that the person who pays the internet bills may
not be the person who pirated the movie or swung in question.
Several judges have noted that an IP address is not a person much to the disappointment
of copyright holders.
To counter this argument, copyright holders have introduced the negligence theory, arguing
that internet subscribers are liable when other people pirate files through their networks.
This would allow copyright holders to sue people even when their targets haven't committed
the offense.
One of these cases was decided last week in favor of the internet subscriber.
The case was stored by adult reader company AF Holdings, who sued an internet account holder
called Josh Hatfield in a California federal court.
AF Holdings claimed that Hatfield had a duty to secure his internet connection and that
he breached that duty by failing to secure his internet connection.
As a result, AF Holdings argued that Hatfield was liable for the copyright infringements
that were committed by an unknown person.
Mr. Hatfield disagreed with this claim and argued that the copyright holder could approve
that people are obliged to secure their wireless networks to prevent piracy.
Even her worked Judge Phyllis Hamilton's side with the defendant.
AF Holdings has not articulated any basis for imposing on Hatfield a legal duty to prevent
the infringement of AF Holdings copyright works and the court is aware of none.
Hamilton writes, to read the rest of the song called Follow Links in the Show Notes.
From TechDirt.com, day at September 14, 2012, by Mike Maznick.
House-approved bill to spy on Americans by misrepresenting or lying about what's
in the bill.
We recently talked about how the House voted to approve the FISA Amendments Act, the FAA,
by a pretty wide margin, and noted some of the more bizarre or inaccurate statements that
representatives made in support of the renewal.
Julian Sanchez has put together a nice summary of some of the more outrageous claims.
The key here is that many reps seemed to take the FISA Amendments Act at face value,
that would only be used to target foreigners in foreign lands, in other words, those with
no fourth amendment protections.
But as Sanchez has pointed out repeatedly, former Deputy Attorney General David Chris
more or less revealed the act is interpreted to mean that as long as the information they
got might be useful in targeting foreigners in foreign lands, it's fair game.
That means contrary to the direct claims of many FAA supporters, the law is used to spy
on Americans.
Sanchez also highlights another sneaky interpretation, the law claims that it prohibits the interception
of purely domestic communications, but there's an additional clause with one hell of a loophole
known at the time of acquisition.
As Sanchez notes, you can drive quite a large truck through that loophole.
Because if you're, say, scooping up email communications, you don't know at the time
of acquisition if it's purely domestic, and therefore you're good to go.
Basically, ignorance is bliss for the NSA.
But these two massive loopholes and sketchy interpretations seem to be totally ignored
by the congressional reps who spoke out most strongly in favor of renewing the FAA.
The most common refrain from FAA supporters was that the law only concerned surveillance
following foreigners in foreign lands, meaning it could not possibly affect the rights of
Americans.
Representative Trey Gowdy, in an impressive display of lung power, delivered a five-minute
floor shout to this effect.
This bill has nothing to do with Americans on American soil.
Gowdy funded.
This bill doesn't implicate the bill of rights.
Any more than it implicates any other part of a constitution, unless you think that foreign
nationals who on foreign land fall within the protections of the United States Constitution.
But Gowdy has to note that this is false because the secret of foreign intelligence surveillance
court has already ruled on at least one occasion that surveillance authorized by the FAA did violate
the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
Similarly, we've seen how the NSA absolutely refuses to say how many Americans have been
spied upon using these tools, claiming that it's impossible to know or that it would violate
their privacy to find out seriously.
But Sanchez notes that despite the NSA insisting it's impossible to know that there's
not representatives from claiming they just knew.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers was slightly more critical, seemingly acknowledging
that the law might permit surveillance for Americans, but that this would happen only
very rarely.
The mystery here is how he could possibly know that Senator Ron Wyden has repeatedly asked
the NSA for a rough ballpark estimate of how many Americans, 100, 1000, 100,000, have
had their communications caught up in the agency's FAA dragnets.
If Representative Rogers were correct, you'd expect the answer to be almost none, but instead
the agency has repeatedly insisted that it is unable to provide even an approximate figure.
Unless Representative Rogers somehow knows things about the NSA's databases that the NSA
does not know, he can't have any real basis for this claim.
And then there's Representative Dan Lunggren, earlier we had noted that there were discussions
during hearings about the FAA.
He brushed off concerns about spying on Americans by saying he hadn't seen any such evidence,
so it couldn't be true.
Of course, he didn't bother to seek out any such evidence by asking the NSA to provide
the data, and here he was even worse.
Having bizarre claims in support of expanding the Feast for Amendments, act that seemed
to go completely against reality.
Finally, Representative Dan Lunggren suggested that the necessity of the FAA was demonstrated
by the failures of intelligence leading up to 9-11.
After all, the 9-11 Commission had again and again emphasized that central failure to
connect the dots that would have revealed an imminent attack before it occurred.
But to connect the dots, Lunggren asserted intelligence agencies would need still more
expansive power to first collect the dots.
This is, in a way, the most breathtakingly erroneous statements heard during Wednesday's
Florida Bates, because it turns the 9-11 Commission's findings completely on their head.
Their report conspicuously did not identify a lack of legal authority to conduct surveillance
as a serious problem.
If anything the trouble was that agencies were drowning in information, they lacked the
capacity to analyze and put to use, perversely, Lunggren trades on familiar phrases, connect
the dots to early invert the Commission's diagnosis of the causes of 9-11.
So if you're keeping track at home, the reasons the House approved this horrible bit of
legislation with massive loopholes that allows the NSA to spy on us is because it can't
be used to spy on us even though it can.
It bossed the collection of domestic communication, except in nearly every case that it does not.
It's barely been used on Americans except that the NSA claims it's impossible to tell
how many Americans it's been used on.
And we need it to connect the dots on terrorism even though it doesn't help connect the dots,
but merely to provide even more dots, many of which will distract from the important
dots.
How do these people get elected?
From TechDirt.com by Tim Kushing, demanding a student's Facebook password, a violation
of First Amendment rights, says Judge, for some strange reason a large number of schools
adhere to the notion that their students are not actually citizens of the United States
and therefore not granted the same rights as the grown-ups, the rational for the limitation
of these rights usually involves the word safety, a word that has been abused in various
forms to curtail rights of full-grown Americans' citizens and other arenas.
This isn't to say that, or even most scholars of violating students' rights, but the sheer
number of incidents report isn't very comforting.
Fortunately, some decisions are being handed down that should, if nothing else, provide precedent
for those challenging administrative overreach.
On September 6th, a decision was handed down in a suit brought against the Minowasca area
school district of Minnesota, dealing with a 12-year-old student who was coerced into giving
school officials the password to her Facebook account so they could search it from messages
they deemed inappropriate.
RS was a 12-year-old student at Minowasca, area middle school.
She posted a message to her Facebook page about an adult hall monitor at her school.
I hate a Kathy person at school because Kathy was mean to me.
The post was only accessible to her friends.
Some of her friends bought the post to the attention of the administration.
The principal called RS into his office and told RS that he considered the message about
Kathy to be impermissible bullying.
As a result of the message, RS was required to apologize, given detention, and received
a disciplinary notation in her records.
RS was disciplined a second time when she expressed her chagrin that someone had told
on her.
I want to know who the fuck told on me.
In the original.
This time she was disciplined for insubordination and dangerous, harmful, and nuisance substances
and articles.
Venkat Balasubremain has added his own punctuation to some of the more dubious or ridiculous statements
made by school officials.
First off is the charge of impermissible bullying.
There's a permissible variety?
A broad term used nearly as often by school administrators as this orderly conduct is used
by cops.
In essence, RS was punished for being a kid.
I.E. not liking something that happened at school, complaining, be it read out, and
complain about that, etc.
The handling of this incident makes the school appear to be as vindictive and thin-skinned
as the child they punished.
This isn't the end of the story, however.
The school also received a complaint from a parent that RS was discussing sexual topics
with another student on the internet for whatever reason most likely stayed as a concern for
her safety.
The school decided to pull RS from class and grill her about the particulars of these
conversations.
Apparently, her answers weren't good enough, so three school counselors and a taser-armed
cop interrogated her until she gave up her Facebook password.
They proceeded to search her account, including private messages for evidence of these conversations,
still not satisfied they decided to search her private email messages.
After this traumatizing and a choose of incident, RS decided to sue the school district for violating
her constitutional rights.
The court agreed with her on both claims, block quote, first amendment claims the court
has no trouble concluding that assuming the facts as alleged as true, school officials
violated RS's first amendment rights.
This court says that posts on social networks are protected unless there are true threats
or are reasonably calculated to reach the school environment and post safety risks or a
risk of substantial disruption of the school environment.
RS's posts were not true threats.
Even assuming the statements were reasonably calculated to reach the school audience, there
was no possibility of disruption.
Both amendment claims, the court also says that the school officials violated RS's
fourth amendment rights to the extent they rummaged around in her Facebook page and her
private email account.
Private emails were like letters of other private conversations and subject to fourth amendment
protections.
Private Facebook messages are no different.
There was no evidence that the officials tailored their search to minimize the intrusion, even
if they had, they had no underlying basis to search in the first place.
And block quote, if the alleged facts are true and the court takes care to point out that
this is an if, the school will likely be writing out a settlement check.
This decision, a response to the school's motion to dismiss, also allows the claims of
invasion of privacy, although it does dismiss claims for intentional inflection of emotional
distress.
It doesn't seem like the school is debating the facts as presented.
Not if it's argument, is that RS's violation of Facebook policy, she's 12, and you have
to be 13 to some foreign account, means she's entitled to fewer constitutional rights, is
any indication.
Eric Goldman adds his own analysis, putting up the inherent problem with most bullying
policies and legislation.
Quote, it's a good example of how administrators might use bullying label as a protection
justification for punishment.
The term bullying has way too much semantic ambiguity, but it should never stretch as far
as calling another person mean.
End quote, this is something administrators should keep in mind when crafting revamping school
policies they should also be reminded of this simple fact, estated by Judge Michael
Davis in his decision.
Quote, for more than 40 years the United States courts have recognized that students do
not check their first amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, unquote, safety does
not trump rights, just as surely as policy does not trump or at least shouldn't trump common
sense and proportionate response.
Other headlines in the news?
To read this article, following in the show notes, where has that cloud server been?
This is a story on Ennis Morris, formerly known as black ratchets of HPR, experience
getting a cheap cloud server and finding a common security hole of old SSH certificates
from an unknown user being in his root directory.
Interesting reading for any SSH using geek indeed.
News from tech.com, worldstory.com, and olgov.com used under a range permission.
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News sources retain their respective copyrights.
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