BAKU (Reuters) – A group of hackers calling themselves Cyberwarriors for Freedom attacked the official websites of the Eurovision song contest on Thursday, demanding that the host nation, Azerbaijan, cancel next week’s competition. Azerbaijan, a mainly Muslim ex-Soviet republic, won the right to host the contest by winning last year’s event in Germany, and sees the competition as a chance to showcase the country. The grand finale is scheduled for May 26. …
(Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd said the UK agency responsible for setting standards for computer security has approved the BlackBerry 7 operating system for government use. This will allow the government employees to use six models of the smart phone including BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9810 and BlackBerry Torch 9860, RIM said. Ministry of defence, central government employees and more than half of the country’s police force use BlackBerry smart phones, the company said. (Reporting by Aftab Ahmed in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
Photo: Jaap Scheeren
On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer. She was due any minute. Kuhl, a lanky 65-year-old, had to remind himself that he was in no rush. He’d sold plenty of artwork over the years, but this batch was altogether different. He needed to be patient.
Tourists milled about the platz in front of the cathedral, Germany’s most visited landmark, craning their necks to snap pictures of the impossibly intricate spires jutting toward the heavens. Kuhl knew those spires well. He had grown up in Cologne and painted the majestic cathedral countless times.
On the other side of a low brick wall surrounding the café, Kuhl finally spotted her. Tall, blond, and trim, Susann Falkenthal looked about 30. As was the case during their previous meetings, she wore practical shoes, an unremarkable blouse and pair of pants, and little makeup. Kuhl thought her plain look was something of a contradiction for a businesswoman who drove a black BMW convertible, but no matter.
When they first met a few months earlier, Falkenthal said she was an events manager from Vilnius, Lithuania, and gave Kuhl a card printed with a Vilnius address as well as an address from the German city of Essen. Her German was flawless.
This appointment by the cathedral was perhaps their 10th, and they greeted each other with a kiss on each cheek. Over the past few months, they had been meeting at Kuhl’s studio. She brought cake; he made coffee. They discussed jazz, Kuhl’s years as a fashion designer, the time Kuhl had met Andy Warhol, vacation spots on the Spanish island of Majorca, and eventually counterfeit US dollars.
If Kuhl couldn’t sell his beautiful fake bills, they would just end up rotting in a storage locker.
Early on, Falkenthal said she did a lot of business with Russian contacts in Vilnius, where unscrupulous types would sometimes try to bribe bouncers with fake $100 bills to gain access to exclusive events organized by her firm. Kuhl sympathized and mentioned a couple of tricks for detecting forgeries. “It’s easy to see and feel if it’s fake or not,” he told her.
A few weeks later, Falkenthal told Kuhl that she had a high-end party coming up in August. Would he be interested in printing the tickets for it? She wanted them to have unique serial numbers and some way to protect against forgeries. Kuhl suggested a strip that shines brightly when exposed to an ultraviolet lamp. Falkenthal told him the official order was for 300 tickets but then with a wink requested he print an extra 50 for her to sell on the side. She obviously isn’t the Pope, Kuhl thought. Working with her might get interesting.
After Kuhl printed the tickets for Falkenthal—including the extra 50—and was paid, he decided to take his chances with her. Not in the romantic sense, although during some of Falkenthal’s visits to his studio, Kuhl certainly noticed the way she’d drape an arm on the back of his desk chair and lean over him to inspect print drafts on his monitor. He thought they could do business. There were risks, Kuhl knew, but he tended to trust people. So he showed her a counterfeit $100 bill that he had made. As a precaution, he told her the sample had come from someone in Poland. There may be many more, he added. She asked if she could borrow it to show to a Russian friend. He said sure but warned her to be cautious. He knew from experience that this “area of business” was full of informants and undercover cops.
Falkenthal called Kuhl two weeks later. Her contact was impressed with the sample and interested in a purchase. They started with a test batch of $250,000, which she bought for 21,600 euros. The price was typical for forgeries, which generally sell at a steep discount because so much of the risk is borne by the buyer. As a consequence, counterfeiting is profitable only on a large scale. During that exchange, Kuhl told Falkenthal that he and his business partner had about $8 million more in currency to sell. “If the contact is satisfied with this first installment, we should talk,” he said. Ten days later she got back to him with good news: The man was “happy with the forgeries” and wanted to make a larger purchase. How about $6.5 million?
Seated at the café across from the cathedral that afternoon, Kuhl handed Falkenthal a note with a price for this new order: 533,000 euros for the $6.5 million in counterfeits. She agreed. Then they decided to make the handoff the next day at his studio. Kuhl also told Falkenthal that to ensure his safety he would have someone nearby during the exchange, just to be sure the handover went smoothly. “I have no choice,” he said, “even though I basically trust you.”
When Kuhl and Falkenthal stood up to part ways, Falkenthal added that she would bring her own boxes. After all, $6.5 million in $100 bills weighs about 150 pounds.
The Internet enabled surveillance on a scale that would have been unimaginable with the old tools of phone taps and informants.
Michael Christopher Brown
He once was known as al-Jamil—the Handsome One—for his chiseled features and dark curls. But four decades as dictator had considerably dimmed the looks of Moammar Gadhafi. At 68, he now wore a face lined with deep folds, and his lips hung slack, crested with a sparse mustache. When he stepped from the shadows of his presidential palace to greet Ghaida al-Tawati, whom he had summoned that evening by sending one of his hulking female bodyguards to fetch her, it was the first time she had seen him without his trademark sunglasses; his eyes were hooded and rheumy. The dictator was dressed in a white Puma tracksuit and slippers. How tired and thin he looked in person, Tawati thought.
It was February 10, 2011, and Libya was in an uproar. Two months earlier, in neighboring Tunisia, a street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi had set himself on fire after a policewoman beat him and confiscated his wares. It was the beginning of the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings, revolutions, and civil wars that would radically alter the politics of the Middle East. In Libya, opponents of the Gadhafi regime had called for a day of protest on February 17, to mark the anniversary of a 2006 protest in the city of Benghazi, where security forces had killed 11 demonstrators and wounded dozens more.
Tawati was one of the most outspoken dissidents blogging openly from inside Libya. Thirty-four years old, with a gravelly childlike voice and singsong laugh that belied her deep stubbornness, she had come to political consciousness during the mid-2000s, at a time when Gadhafi, seeking reconciliation with the West, had ceased using his most heavy-handed tactics of repression—such as outright massacres—and allowed a modicum of public dissent. During her university days, when the Internet had begun to ease the country’s isolation, Tawati took naturally to the roles of gadfly and outsider. Her parents had divorced when she was young; in Libya’s deeply conservative culture, growing up with a single mother made her a social outcast. The injustice she experienced as a child led her to critique the injustice of the dictatorial regime, particularly on women’s issues—for example, she blogged about a sexual abuse scandal at a home for unwed mothers institutionalized by the Gadhafi government. Over time she won a modest following online. As the planned protests of February 17 approached, Tawati, always prone to impassioned rhetoric, blogged that if Libyans failed to turn out for the demonstrations she would burn herself just as Bouazizi had done. Somehow Gadhafi himself had heard news of this threat and decided he needed to meet her.
Despite the dictator’s haggard appearance, his manner remained confident and effusive. When he wanted to be, Gadhafi was a legendary charmer, a man deeply at ease with ordinary Libyans. He shook Tawati’s hand and patted her shoulder paternally, directing her to sit next to him on the sofa. He asked her about her health, her family, where she was from. He asked her who had taught her to write. She told him about her demands for greater openness and accountability in Libya, taking care not to criticize him directly. He seemed sympathetic, nodding at various points. Finally she worked up the courage to ask him why the government had blocked YouTube several months earlier.
Gadhafi acted oblivious. “Is it switched off?” he asked.
She complained to him about the way that allies of his regime had treated her. Ever since she’d started blogging under her own name in 2007, Tawati had been harassed—and worse. “Ghaida al-Tawati, the goat of the Internet,” read one Facebook page her attackers created; a string of graphic sexual comments were posted underneath her photo. More bewildering, though, was the invasion of privacy: Somehow, emails of hers had been leaked onto the Internet, even displayed on state television, she told Gadhafi. She had been accused of working with foreign agents. Her reputation as a woman had been smeared.
“If you want to get married,” he interjected, “we’ll get you married to the best man.”
“I’m not interested in getting married,” she replied.
“So, have you made an appointment to burn yourself, then?” Gadhafi asked suddenly, a wry smile curling his lips.
Tawati said that she hadn’t—yet.
“What do you really want from me?” he asked with exasperation.
“You already know the reason why people are demonstrating,” she replied.
Gadhafi’s gaze settled on her for a moment. He asked her to come work for him. The two of them would solve these problems together, he said.
It was an odd show of vulnerability, this bid to co-opt her rather than threaten or crush her. This was the moment, Tawati would later say, that she realized the uprising would succeed. The old man didn’t understand just how committed she and other dissidents were to his downfall. In Libya, as in Egypt and elsewhere, the drive toward revolution drew much of its energy from young, educated activists like Tawati, for whom online tools served as an unprecedented means for communicating and rallying support.
But like Tawati, these activists would suffer greatly at the hands of Gadhafi’s spy service, whose own capabilities had been heightened by 21st-century technology. By now, it’s well known that the Arab Spring showed the promise of the Internet as a crucible for democratic activism. But, in the shadows, a second narrative unfolded, one that demonstrated the Internet’s equal potential for government surveillance and repression on a scale unimaginable with the old analog techniques of phone taps and informants. Today, with Gadhafi dead and a provisional government of former rebels in charge, we can begin to uncover the secret, high tech spying machine that helped the dictator and his regime cling to power.
One of the world’s top handset makers has acknowledged the existence of a backdoor in one of its models.
ZTE, which is based in China and produces the ScoreM, which sells as a Google Android phone, admitted that it had placed a backdoor account with a hardcoded password, which is easily found online. The backdoor was used by the company to remotely update its firmware, according to Reuters. But its existence would also allow anyone else with knowledge of the password to access a Score phone and gain root access.
“It could very well be that they’re not very good developers or they could be doing this for nefarious purposes,” Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told the news service.
ZTE has vowed to fix the security hole.
“ZTE is actively working on a security patch and expects to send the update over-the-air to affected users in the very near future,” ZTE told Reuters. “We strongly urge affected users to download and install the patch as soon as it is rolled out to their devices.”
Photo: ToastyKen/Flickr
LOS ANGELES — Federal regulators considered testimony Wednesday here at UCLA Law School on whether to allow citizens and filmmakers to legally crack DVD encryption meant to protect the discs from being copied.
Filmmakers, video mixers and others have petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office for the ability to continue to use DVD decryption tools to copy short clips of DVDs from motion pictures to put into their own films. The issue isn’t whether they have a fair-use right to the material, but whether they can utilize decrypting tools to make the best reproduction for filmmaking purposes.
Another proposal for the first time calls for the public at large to be authorized to make copies of their own DVDs without breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes it unlawful to circumvent encryption technologies in items that you buy.
Earlier in the day, here at UCLA, regulators held a hearing as part of its deliberations over whether it will continue to allow Americans to jailbreak their mobile phones, and whether they will expand that right to cover tablets and videogame consoles. Jailbreaking and rooting are techniques used to get past manufacturer-installed roadblocks that prevent users from having full control over their devices.
Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office entertains requests to create temporary loopholes in the law that outlaws the circumvention of encryption technologies. The afternoon public hearing largely focused on the s0-called CSS that must be cracked to make a copy of a DVD. All DMCA exemptions, which are proposed by the public, expire in three years and must be reauthorized by the Copyright Office.
Clarissa Weirick, the general counsel of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment, testified against all the decryption measures.
“If we didn’t have access controls, there might be the same kind of mass piracy we’ve seen with unprotected music,” Weirick said about the copying of DVDs, a proposal put forth by digital rights group Public Knowledge, which did not attend the hearing.
Weirick, a representative from Fox and the major motion picture studios under the Motion Picture Association of America opposed all the measures proposed in the afternoon public hearing, which included about 2 dozen members of the public in attendance.
They said that there is no need to grant the public the right to make copies of their DVDs because the studios are streaming and selling movies online now, and that the public does not own the movies they buy on DVDs. They own the license to play it on a DVD, they argued.
And when it comes to cracking encryption to make snippets out of films to be put in new films, the industry opposed reauthorizing the cracking of the DVD encryption for that purpose. The industry testified that filmmakers instead can use screen-capturing software or they can license the clips from the studios.
Filmmakers oppose that because of the poor quality of screen-capture reproduction.
(Screen-capturing does not crack encryption because it copies what is shown on a computer screen.)
Filmmaker Laurence Thrush testified that screen-capturing software turns clips into “mush.”
“The fabric of reality is very important to these projects,” he testified.
Jonathan McIntosh, a remix artist, was also asking the regulators to allow him to bypass circumvention that prevents the copying of streamed movies, so that he may use the best picture quality available of the snippets he places in his own films. Doing so, he said, helps “to engage in a healthy public debate.”
He said he has a “zero budget” when it comes to paying for a license, some of which carry clauses that forbid filmmakers from disparaging the movie.
Maria Pallante, the register of copyrights, wondered aloud:
“But I think we’ve heard the market is changing rapidly. Licensing options are changing. Conceivably even with a budget of zero, permission might be possible,” she said.
Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property coordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Pallante and other top-ranking lawyers in the U.S. Copyright Office here that granting the exemptions at issue is “not going to help pirates,” so they must be granted.
Exemptions are allotted by the Copyright Office if regulators are convinced consumers are “adversely affected in their ability to make non-infringing use due to the prohibition on circumvention.”
Approved exemptions by the Copyright Office must be also be sanctioned by the Librarian of Congress, currently James Billington. Regulators are not expected to make any approvals until later this year, at a date not yet disclosed.
Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
LOS ANGELES — To jailbreak or not to jailbreak? That was the question on everybody’s mind Thursday as copyright regulators, content creators and digital rights groups battled over whether Americans should have the right to tinker with the devices that they buy.
The U.S. Copyright Office held the hearing Thursday as part of its deliberations over whether it will continue to allow Americans to jailbreak their mobile phones, and whether they will expand that right to cover tablets and videogame consoles. Jailbreaking and rooting are techniques used to get past manufacturer-installed roadblocks that prevent users from having full control over their devices. In the case of the iPhone, jailbreaking allows users to run applications not approved by Apple.
Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office entertains requests to create temporary loopholes in the law that makes it unlawful to circumvent encryption technologies in items that you buy. It’s that time again, the fifth go-around following the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s 1998 passage.
“This is essentially like letting consumers open the hoods of their own cars,” said Marcia Hofmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is asking for the hardware exemptions.
About two dozen exemptions have been granted since the DMCA’s passage. They are allotted by the Copyright Office if regulators are convinced consumers are “adversely affected in their ability to make non-infringing use due to the prohibition on circumvention.”
The office granted the exemption for mobile phones in 2010, which makes it set to expire next year.
Later in the day, here at the UCLA School of Law, the public hearing will shift to a discussion of cracking of the CSS encryption on motion picture DVDs.
It’s all part of a long-running showdown between the big copyright holders who view the world as divided into creators and consumers, and a coalition of librarians, digital rights groups, disability activists and hackers who seek to preserve a world where people can repurpose, upgrade and build upon the devices and media they legally buy, just as hackers, painters and culture jammers have done for decades before the DMCA.
EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. Photo: redtimmy/Flickr
Christian Genetski, general counsel of the Entertainment Software Association, told the Copyright Office, whose panelists included its top attorneys and Maria Pallante, the register of copyrights, that freeing Americans to bypass access controls on videogame consoles would decimate the gaming business.
“It will gut videogame consoles’ piracy protections,” he said. “We’re here today because our copyright interests are at stake.”
Allowing such jailbreaking, Hofmann countered, would allow the so-called homebrew community of game developers to play their games on the machines, while also allowing researchers to use the consoles like computers in the furtherance of science.
But the regulators were not clear whether the videogame hack was necessary. They suggested scientists could use computers for their research, and homebrew gamers can play those, too, on their computers.
Robert Kasunic, deputy general counsel of the Copyright Office, suggested that the benefits don’t outweigh the tradeoffs to piracy.
“How do you balance, for instance, the use of being able to put Pong on a homebrew system with the numbers we are aware of in terms of videogame piracy?” he asked, noting that millions of videogames are already being shared without authorization on The Pirate Bay.
David Carson, the office’s general counsel, asked Hofmann whether Sony, the maker of the PlayStation, has ever denied a researcher who had asked to re-enable access to Linux that the PlayStation once provided.
“I have not heard of any instances of that,” Hofmann replied.
Genetski said the risk was too great. Authorizing videogame-console hacking would foster an even greater videogame pirating community, he argued.
For research and playing homebrewed games, he said, “Clearly, there is an alternative platform that is available.”
All DMCA exemptions, which are proposed by the public, expire every three years and must be reauthorized by the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office’s approved exemptions must then be approved by the Librarian of Congress, currently James Billington.
Regulators are not expected to make any approvals until later this year, at a date not yet disclosed.
But when it came to leaving intact the office’s 2010 decision authorizing smartphone jailbreaking — to acquire root access to the phone — the regulators appeared to believe phone users have a fair use right to do so, to enable them to run apps of their choice.
“Developers need the access to produce better-quality applications. Can you respond to that?” Pallante asked Steve Metalitz, who represented the Business Software Alliance, the motion picture studios and recording artists.
“The exemption should be limited to that,” Metalitz said.
He added that regulators should not dictate to American companies like Apple what apps they should allow on their phones.
“There is a no god-given right to sell a Chevy at Ford dealers,” he said.
Jay Freeman, the founder of Cydia, the alternative Apple app store for jailbroken iOS devices, said in the last year alone, 54 million unique Apple devices have downloaded his store. Freeman did not testify, but was in the audience of less than two dozen onlookers.
He noted that during the last exemption go-around, Apple staunchly protested, saying authorizing jailbreaking would ruin its business model, which at the time included 1 billion Apple-approved app downloads.
Today, more than 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s app store, and its stock is skyrocketing. Apple, which had also claimed jailbreaking would open cell towers to sabotage, was nowhere in sight at today’s hearing.
“Apple just doesn’t seem to care,” Freeman said of the latest jailbreaking proposal.
Still, the regulators said they needed more information about authorizing, for the first time, the ability to jailbreak tablets, despite the widespread ability for the public to already do so via the Dev-Team for Apple’s devices and a motley crew of other Android rooting teams.
For starters, the regulators noted that e-readers are included in the EFF’s tablet proposal.
Carson suggested that allowing the jailbreaking of a Nook or Kindle, or other “single-purpose” device, “might jeopardize” the copyrighted material on those devices.
“There are some very important copyright concerns that might be militating against it,” he said.
Comcast is replacing its strict 250GB monthly data cap for residential users with a higher cap and a way to buy extra data, hoping to stem criticism that the nation’s largest cable ISP is throttling the open internet.
Comcast is suspending enforcement of its hard 250GB cap nationwide as of Thursday, while it prepares two regional tests of new caps that come with ways to buy chunks of data if you go over them. Users who repeatedly crossed Comcast’s 250GB cap, instated in 2007, have been be cut off and banned from the network for a year. Critics, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, have accused Comcast of trying to protect its core cable television business from online video services.
Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen said that kind of cap sent the wrong message, especially since only a “small small percentage gets near the threshold.” The company declined to say what that percentage is.
“We want to send a signal to customers that our network is robust and has tremendous capacity,” Cohen said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “We don’t want customers to have a sense that we can’t use this app on the internet.”
The two upcoming trials will impose a 300GB cap, with overage fees of about $10 for 50GB of more data. In one trial, faster tiers of service will have higher caps, while the other will impose the same 300GB cap on all speeds.
“This will effectively offer unlimited use of service,” Cohen said. “Customers can buy and use as much data as they like.”
But Cohen admitted Comcast doesn’t want users to think that the network has that much capacity. The cap is being raised a mere 50GB (less than a 5 percent yearly increase in capacity). And the company is spending considerable effort to measure the traffic for each customer, to build a usage meter and create a warning and billing system.
And as more people scale back or eliminate cable television subscriptions in favor of online video, data usage will continue to grow. Video streams, especially high-quality video, uses a lot of bandwidth. An HD movie, for instance, can take about 3.5GB of data. However the price of moving data continues to fall dramatically, so that a large cable operator like Comcast pays a tiny, and falling, percentage of its revenue for moving data in and out of its network.
While the company declined to clearly explain why it was even bothering to keep a cap, Comcast is either laying the groundwork for a future where many customers actually pass their cap regularly and pay for more data – as the nation’s two largest mobile carriers are betting on, or they are facing a real problem with over-usage by a very small percentage of their userbase that they think they can solve with a method less draconian (and bad-PR-producing) than cutting the user off.
Comcast also seemed to be trying to divert attention from a controversy surrounding their new service for XBox users which streams the company’s cable TV offering to the XBox using IP protocol. But that data usage doesn’t apply to the cap, which some see as a violation of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules. But Comcast says it’s in the clear since its allocated a new slice of its cable pipes to the product, so the traffic isn’t technically competing with online video such as YouTube or Netflix.
Comcast did not say whether those who had been booted from the network under the old policy would be given amnesty to return. Comcast has yet not started the trials or determined their exact parameters or locations.
Local traffic congestion measures, where Comcast throttles heavy data users for 15-minute periods when local loops are filling up, will remain in effect, now and into the future, Cohen said.
But until the trials finish and the new pay-as-you-go model is put into effect, there’s a brief window of unlimited data use for Comcast customers, so download while the downloading is good.
Photo: Imelda/Flickr
A bill requiring law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant to collect an individual’s geolocation data from cellphone carriers would be burdensome to criminal investigators and prevent them from gathering the evidence they need to make a case, according to law enforcement witnesses at a hearing on Thursday.
Requiring agents to obtain such warrants is backward logic, since they often use geolocation data they’ve collected on an individual in order to then obtain a probable cause warrant for further collection of evidence, according to John Ramsey, national vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who spoke to the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
“These are not witch hunts as some may allude to,” Ramsey said. “Information obtained with these court orders provides law enforcement with historical data, as well as possible location information, which becomes important when determining whether the need rises to the level of a court order or a warrant.”
But Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, disputed this and said the warrant requirement would impose no great burden on investigators.
“Under the GPS Act, obtaining warrants for geolocational information would be even less burdensome than obtaining them for telephone wiretaps, and the expectation of privacy implicated in placing calls on a public phone is no greater than the expectation that the state will not, absent a warrant, monitor a citizen’s every movement continuously for months on end,” she said.
She noted that police in the County of Hawaii, as well as in Wichita, Kansas, and Lexington, Kentucky, already obtain warrants to track cellphones, and have shown no sign that they are burdened by the practice.
“If these police departments can protect both public safety and privacy by meeting the warrant and probable cause requirements, then surely other agencies can as well,” she told lawmakers.
In an attempt to close a hole left by a recent Supreme Court decision, Senate and congressional lawmakers have proposed a joint bill that would help protect the privacy of geolocation data by forcing law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant to collect it.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that persistent monitoring of someone’s location by placing a GPS tracker on their vehicle was unreasonable and amounted to a Fourth Amendment search, but the court fell short of asserting that such tracking amounted to the kind of search that should always require a warrant and probable cause.
During oral arguments, Justice Antonin Scalia threw the ball into the court of lawmakers, suggesting they should do what the justices didn’t do and create protections that would guard against lazy or overzealous law enforcement agencies abusing the use of tracking data.
“Don’t we have any legislatures out there that could stop this stuff?” Scalia asked.
The bill, known as the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, is a response to that challenge, said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) during the hearing to discuss the bill. Chaffetz authored the House bill, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) authored a companion bill in the Senate (.pdf).
The bill is an attempt to set a nationwide standard on not only GPS tracking, but on the collection of cellphone location data and any other geolocational data that could be introduced by future technologies.
Current generations of cell-location technology have greatly improved the accuracy of tracking and can place a person on a specific floor of a building or even a specific room, University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze noted in a written statement submitted for the hearing (.pdf).
This would allow an extensive profile to be drawn from a person’s location over an extended period of time. As Justice Sotomayor noted during the Supreme Court arguments, “trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on,” could all be revealed through such extensive tracking of an individual’s location.
The bill would impose limitations on such tracking by requiring the same standard of proof on geolocation data that is imposed for conducting searches in homes and require law enforcement agents to obtain a probable cause warrant to collect the information, whether the data being sought was historical or real-time.
It contains several exceptions for emergency circumstances in which law enforcement needs to obtain data urgently – such as cases involving the safety of a child, or any emergency case where someone is at risk of death or bodily harm, as well as cases involving the tracking of stolen property.
China's second J-20 stealth fighter. Image: David Cenciotti and fyjs.cn
Last year, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was greeted in Beijing by China’s experimental stealth jet buzzing over his head. Gates didn’t sweat it: He proclaimed that the J-20 wouldn’t be ready until at least 2020. Oops.
The Pentagon’s top China official has now revised that estimate. The J-20, China’s first stealth jet, will be operationally ready “no sooner than 2018,” David Helvey, deputy secretary of defense for East Asia and Asia Pacific Security Affairs, told reporters Friday.
The new anticipated timetable for the J-20 hardly augurs the end of American military dominance. But it wasn’t the only Chinese military development that took the Pentagon by surprise last year.
According to the Pentagon’s new report (.pdf) on the Chinese military, China’s got three nuclear-powered submarines — an advance that Helvey conceded the U.S. military didn’t anticipate. China also fielded an “improved” amphibious assault vessel last year, while the U.S. Marine Corps is having trouble upgrading its own.
And that’s just the stuff that the Pentagon can see. Helvey speculated that the Chinese military keeps its research, foreign military acquisitions and nuclear modernization off its books. The report estimates that China’s declared $106 billion annual military budget is really more like $120 to $180 billion.
None of that means China’s military will overtake America’s anytime soon. China won’t, for instance, have a global communications and navigation satellite network until 2020, which means it doesn’t have a prayer of having a truly global Navy until at least then — even if it starts building its own aircraft carriers. Helvey disclosed that China still has neither built nor acquired any armed drones, and the spy robo-planes it has are the Harpies that Israel sold it nearly a decade ago. And while China may have an amphibious ship, the report says it can’t actually invade or hold nearby Taiwan, let alone any target further away or better defended.
At the same time, it’s hard not to notice that America’s own stealth fleet keeps racking up #fails.
First there’s the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor. It’s choking its pilots, and the Air Force doesn’t know why. Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, this week restricted Raptor flights and hurried up an installation of a backup oxygen system onto the jets — which won’t be complete until at least 2014. Panetta did not ground the F-22, so the nearly 200 planes will definitely be in Air Force’s arsenal ahead of the J-20. But until the mysterious oxygen problems are decisively fixed, pilots may be wary of flying them, and the Air Force leadership may be wary of ordering it into combat.
Then there’s the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a family of jets for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. It’s already the most expensive weapons program in human history — current estimates peg the F-35′s lifetime costs over decades at $1.1 trillion-with-a-T — and not a single one of the advanced, powerful stealth jets is in the air. The Marines’ variant was so riddled with cost-overruns that it was put on a timeout in 2011; it’s off probation now. But testers keep finding expensive engineering flaws with the family of jets, and the Pentagon has given up predicting when it will actually patrol the skies.
The U.S. doesn’t want conflict with the Chinese, whose economy is inextricably tied to its own. But it might not see one coming. Especially not if China’s stealth planes are advancing while its own are stalling.
