Pirate Party censored from helping people bypass Pirate Bay block

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The Pirate Bay and Pirate Party are big news recently, and the Dutch courts have turned on the spotlight on the issues of censorship, internet freedom and copyright infringement with this week's court rulings.

A court in The Hague has ruled that Dutch internet providers - UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile, and Telfort - follow the lead of dutch ISP big dogs, Ziggo and XS4ALL, and block users from accessing one of the world's biggest file-sharing sites, The Pirate Bay.

The court has also ordered that the Pirate Party, a political party in favour of free sharing of information and data, remove all links and workaround instructions on how to bypass the ISP block on The Pirate Bay.

The Dutch Pirate Party has been providing information and links to its visitors to help them circumvent the recent Pirate Bay ISP blocks.

Copyright lobby group BREIN foundation, a trade body looking after the interests of the Dutch recording industry, made the case that The Pirate Bay allowed file sharing without authors' consent. It then went after the Pirate Party for providing links to get around The Pirate Bay block.

The Pirate Party has been ordered by the courts "to cease & desist presenting direct links to other The Pirate Bay dedicated proxies".

An official Dutch Pirate Party article states:

Direct links to reverse proxies appear to be forbidden everywhere for the Pirate Party now, and on top of that, tpb.piratenpartij.nl is no longer allowed to hold any information, or even links to information, on how to circumvent the block. With copyright at its side, BREIN has been successful in literally censoring a political party from giving information on how to circumvent censorship itself.

The Dutch Pirate Party says that it is analysing the verdict to decide on its next steps, but that it now must comply with the ruling, "albeit under loud protest."

The post invites donations from its supporters to meet the €10,000 fine, should they want to see the site ignore the court ruling.

The Pirate Bay, which has an estimated 30+ million users, is designed to allow users to freely share files using torrents and peer-to-peer networks. The objective of block order is to limit access to the site's four-million-plus torrents of movies, music and TV shows.

You might expect the number of torrents to decrease after the initial court-ordered Pirate Bay blocks that ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL put in place. But University of Amsterdam researchers demonstrated that the blocks has had no impact on the number of BitTorrent pirates.

The Pirate Bay also said that they received a surge of traffic when bans were put in place.

UK ISPs - Virgin, Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk and O2 - faced similar orders last week.

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file sharing image courtesy of Shutterstock
Dutch flag image courtesy of Shutterstock

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US House declines to block employers demanding Facebook passwords

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The US House of Representatives on Wednesday voted down a bid to stop telecommunications companies from demanding Facebook logins from prospective job applicants.

The proposal [PDF], titled "Mind Your Own Business on Passwords," came from Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat, as the House debated over an act that aims to reform the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Perlmutter proposed that the bill be sent back to committee amended with a paragraph allowing the FCC to bar telecoms from requiring the logins.

V3 quoted Perlmutter as saying:

"No American should have to provide their confidential personal passwords as a condition of employment. Both users of social media and those who correspond share the expectation of privacy in their personal communications."

Many have shared his sentiment, particularly during the week following several reports of companies and government agencies who request Facebook login so that interviewers can have a look-see at anything a job applicant has marked private.

In fact, 91% of polled Naked Security readers agree that it should be illegal.

As the Associated Press noted, the legality of the practice is dubious indeed. Proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland would forbid public agencies from asking for social network access.

Given that requiring Facebook logins of job applicants had nothing to do with the issue at hand, the House's refusal to amend the FCC reform bill this week does nothing to clear up the question of legality.

In fact, as CBS News's Declan McCullagh pointed out, Perlmutter's was little more than "a transparent, if clever, delaying tactic."

As McCullagh wrote, all Perlmutter had to do was suggest an amendment, not send the whole thing back to committee.

At any rate, McCullagh notes, it's not companies regulated by the FCC that are being profiled as Facebook login requesters. Rather, the anecdotes regarding login demanders have mostly sprung from the actions of law enforcement agencies, which aren't regulated by the FCC and wouldn't be affected by the bill.

CBS News quoted Rep. Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who chairs a communications and technology subcommittee, agreed with Perlmutter that "it's awful" for employers to feel free to demand passwords and then "go snooping around."

The problem is, Perlmutter's amendment wouldn't have protected anybody, Walden said during the floor debate:

"Your amendment doesn't protect them. It doesn't do that. Actually, what this amendment does is say that all of the reforms that we are trying to put in place at the Federal Communications Commission, in order to have them have an open and transparent process where they are required to publish their rules in advance so that you can see what they're proposing, would basically be shoved aside. They could do whatever they wanted on privacy if they wanted to, and you wouldn't know it until they published their text afterward. There is no protection here."

Perlmutter's delaying tactic says more about Democrats' opposition to the Republican-backed bill to reform the FCC than it does about a sincere desire to protect Facebook users' privacy.

The bill, titled the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, would require the currently Democratic-controlled agency to be more transparent and to prepare economic impact analyses.

The House rejected Perlmutter's amendment by a vote of 184 to 236. The FCC reform measure itself was approved by a vote of 247 to 174. It has not yet been approved by the Senate.

The White House released a statement [PDF] on Monday claiming that the GOP bill would prevent the FCC from exercising "its statutory duty to protect the public interest."

This is not about privacy. This is a sideshow, a scuffle between the parties.

The question of privacy deserves to be more than a spurious footnote used to jam the gears of an unrelated bill. Let's hope that the proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland does the job by actually focusing on the issue at hand.

Follow @LisaVaas

Private property image courtesy of shuttershock

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Hackers protest BART decision to block cellphones

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco's mass transit system prepared for renewed protests Monday, a day after hackers angry over blocked cell phone service at some transit stations broke into a website and posted company contact information for more than 2,000 customers.

The action by a hacker group known as Anonymous was the latest showdown between anarchists angry at perceived attempts to limit free speech and officials trying to control protests that grow out of social networking and have the potential to become violent.

Anonymous posted people's names, phone numbers, and street and email addresses on its own website, while also calling for a disruption of the Bay Area Rapid Transit's evening commute Monday.

BART officials said Sunday that they were working a strategy to try to block any efforts by protesters to try to disrupt the service.

"We have been planning for the protests that are said to be shaping up for tomorrow," BART spokesman Jim Allison said. He did not provide specifics, but said BART police will be staffing stations and trains and that the agency had already contacted San Francisco police.

The transit agency disabled the effected website, myBART.org, Sunday night after it also had been altered by apparent hackers who posted images of the so-called Guy Fawkes masks that anarchists have previously worn when showing up to physical protests.

The cyber attack came in response to the BART's decision to block wireless service in several of its San Francisco stations Thursday night as the agency aimed to thwart a planned protest over a transit police shooting. Officials said the protest had been designed to disrupt the evening commute.

"We are Anonymous, we are your citizens, we are the people, we do not tolerate oppression from any government agency," the hackers wrote on their own website. "BART has proved multiple times that they have no problem exploiting and abusing the people."

Allison described myBART.org as a "satellite site" used for marketing purposes. It's operated by an outside company and sends BART alerts and other information to customers, Allison said.

The names and contact info published by Sunday came from a database of 55,000 subscribers, he said. He did not know if the group had obtained information from all the subscribers, he said, adding that no bank account or credit card information was listed.

The BART computer problem was the latest hack the loosely organized group claimed credit for this year. Last month, the FBI and British and Dutch officials made 21 arrests, many of them related to the group's attacks on Internet payment provider PayPal Inc., which has been targeted over its refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. The group also claims credit for disrupting the websites of Visa and MasterCard in December when the credit card companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

BART's decision to shut down wireless access was criticized by many as heavy handed, and some raised questions about whether the move violated free speech.

The problems began Thursday night when BART officials blocked wireless access to disrupt organization of a demonstration protesting the July 3 shooting death by BART police who said the 45-year-old victim was wielding a knife.

Activists also remain upset by the 2009 death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black passenger who was shot by a white officer on an Oakland train platform. The officer quit the force and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after the shooting.

Facing backlash from civil rights advocates and one of its own board members, BART has defended the decision to block cell phone use, with Allison saying the cell phone disruptions were legal because the agency owns the property and infrastructure.

"I'm just shocked that they didn't think about the implications of this. We really don't have the right to be this type of censor," Lynette Sweet, who serves on BART's board of directors, said previously. "In my opinion, we've let the actions of a few people affect everybody. And that's not fair."

Laura Eichman was among those whose email and home phone number were published by the hackers Sunday.

"I think what they (the hackers) did was illegal and wrong. I work in IT myself, and I think that this was not ethical hacking. I think this was completely unjustified," Eichman said.

She said she doesn't blame BART and feels its action earlier in the week of blocking cell phone service was reasonable.

"It doesn't necessarily keep me from taking BART in the future but I will certainly have to review where I set up accounts and what kind of data I'm going to keep online," Eichman said.

Michael Beekman of San Francisco told the AP that he didn't approve of BART's move to cut cell phone service or the Anonymous posting.

"I'm not paranoid but i feel like it was an invasion of privacy," he said. "I thought I would never personally be involved in any of their (Anonymous') shenanigans."

The group Anonymous, according to its website, does "not tolerate oppression from any government agency," and it said it was releasing the User Info Database of MyBart.gov as one of many actions to come.

"We apologize to any citizen that has his information published, but you should go to BART and ask them why your information wasn't secure with them," the statement said.

___

Associated Press writers Terry Tang and Bob Seavey in Phoenix also contributed to this report.

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