Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1st amendment, copyright, copyright police, DHS, Dictatorship, Empire, free speech, global government, global police, global police force, homeland security, ICE, internet enforcement, internet police, IP, IP enforcement, john morton, new world order, Police State, Rojadirecta, spain, us constitution, us customs, Victoria Espinel, world government, world police
Homeland Security Seizes Domain Names From Other Countries
Tech Dirt
February 1, 2011
It appears that Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, and their incredibly sloppy domain seizure operations, have moved on to the next phase — as was promised by both ICE boss, John Morton, and IP Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel. The timing on this one is particularly bizarre — and politically stupid.
That’s because the the domain seizure is for the Spanish streaming site Rojadirecta. Yes, ICE seized the domain name of a foreign company. And it gets worse. Rojadirecta is not just some fly-by-night operation run out of someone’s basement or something. It’s run by a legitimate company in Spain, and the site’s legality has been tested in the Spanish courts… and the site was declared legal. The court noted that since Rojadirecta does not host any material itself, it does not infringe.
So, a full-on trial and legal process that took three years in a foreign country, and involved a series of appeals leading to a final judgment…. all totally ignored by a bunch of US customs agents.
You might think some folks in Spain would have a pretty serious issue with this move.
And the timing is especially ridiculous, given that the US has been pushing very, very hard for Spain to implement a new copyright law, driven in large part by Hollywood. With many in Spain already furious about US meddling in their own copyright laws, I can’t imagine that having US customs agents reaching across the Atlantic to just out and out seize a Spanish company’s domain name is going to go over very well.
Imagine if a Spanish law enforcement agency did that to a US company? How quickly would we see American politicians screaming about this “international incident.” Yet, here we have Homeland Security reaching out to seize the domain name of a foreign company that has been explicitly declared legal, after going through a lengthy trial and appeals process in its native country. And, in typical Homeland Security fashion, no one bothered to contact the company and let them know or express its concerns. Instead, it just seized the domain.
I would imagine that doing so may upset Spanish citizenry even more than the attempt to rewrite copyright laws in Hollywood’s favor.
And of course, it appears that, despite the serious questions raised about the last domain seizures, in particular of blogs with substantial non-infringing uses, ICE has also seized another blog, called StrikeGently, which appears to have included lots of other content. Yes, it did also include some links to downloads hosted on other sites, but did not host any content directly itself, and appears to have included plenty of other content beyond the links to downloads. Once again, no one is saying that the site is clearly legal. It may, in fact, be liable for inducement. However, that’s something that’s supposed to be determined at trial, and not after the government steps in with no notice whatsoever and takes the domain name away.
Apparently, Homeland Security and ICE have decided that the mistakes it made last time are so minor that it will repeat them again and again, even if it involves shutting down protected speech and interfering in international relations.
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, Big Brother, Control Grid, data mining, DHS, DNI, FCC, George Bush, Homeland Security, internet, michael chertoff, Mike McConnell, Military, neocons, NSA, orwell, Russia, Surveillance, telecoms, US Constitution, War On Terror, warrantless search, warrantless wiretap | Tags: Computer Emergency Readiness Team, cyber security, Director of National Intelligence, einstein program, FY2009, IP, PINWALE, PINWHEEL, project einstein, SIGINT, signals intelligence, US-CERT
’Einstein’ Program: The All-seeing eye of internet activity
Wayne Madsen
Online Journal
September 19, 2008
WMR has learned from government sources that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the “Einstein” program.
Billed as a cyber-security intrusion detection system for federal computer systems and networks, WMR has been told that the actual intent of Einstein is to initially monitor the email and web surfing activities of federal employees and contractors and not in protecting government computer systems from intrusion by outsiders.
In February 2008, President Bush signed a directive that designated the National Security Agency (NSA) as the central administrator for the federal government’s computer and network security.
Although Einstein is primarily a program under the aegis of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) of the National Cyber Security Division of the Homeland Security Department, WMR has learned that it has the personal support of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, a former NSA director. Einstein is advertised as merely conducting traffic analysis within the dot (.) gov and dot (.) mil domains, including data packet lengths, protocols, source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, time stamp information, and autonomous system numbers. However, WMR has learned that Einstein will also bore down into the text of email and analyze message content. In fact, most of the classified budget allotted to Einstein is being used for collecting information from the text of messages and not the header data.
In fact, WMR has learned that most of the classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWHEEL, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. According to NSA documents obtained by WMR, there is an NSA system code-named ”PINWALE.”
The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation’s critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called “black” projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has budgeted $5.4 billion for Einstein in his department’s FY2009 information technology budget. However, this amount does not take into account the “black” budgets for Einstein proliferation throughout the U.S. telecommunications network contained in the budgets for NSA and DNI.
In anticipation of the regulatory problems inherent in domestic email surveillance by the NSA, the Bush administration has ensured that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and industry associations have been stacked with pro-surveillance loyalists to ensure that Einstein is widely accepted and implemented.
noworldsystem.com 