Hi all. I am pretty much a lurker around these parts, generally because when I chime in on the chat, someone starts thinking I used to play a Jedi Knight on the big screen. I’ve been in IT for more than 15 years and currently do project management work at a non-profit focused on public education. In my free time I work as a football official in middle and high school football games in Texas. So enough about me, on to what, in my estimation, are the best posts of the week.

For me the top post of the week focused on the hypocrisy of the US . As a child of the 80s, the notions of democracy and freedom were central to why we would “win” the Cold War. The revelations about the NSA, CIA, FBI and DEA (did I forget anyone?) spying and trampling all over the constitution has just shattered the myth around what the US stands for. You want to believe in the myth that the US stands for freedom and openness when everything we’ve seen since the Snowden leaks began has shown that is no longer, and may have never been, the case. Of course, in the usual tone deaf way of the government as a whole these days, on Friday General Alexander gives an interview in which he insists the problem is the press and not, you know, the surveillance and dragnets.

Working for a non-profit, getting maximum value out of my projects is one of my success factors for any project. Therefore I found the story about the bungled healthcare website implementation of particular interest. For me, I would have approached the folks who built my bank’s or credit card’s website or Google or Yahoo for the job. Instead, it was government as usual and making sure the connections get greased and the campaign coffers filled. The goals of the implementation were all wrong, it wasn’t to get people to sign up for health care in the most efficient manner possible, instead it was to fill bank accounts.

Of course, the health care website and spying agencies weren’t the only government departments with problems this week. The TSA admitted that they were checking on us poor travelers long before they even got invasive with the searches. And that wasn’t even the worst revelation of the week, since they admitted that it's all probably unncessary . Then law enforcement was dealt a smackdown when a judge finally ruled against warrantless GPS devices. Hopefully this means the Constitution isn’t a myth to everyone in the government after all.

What week isn’t complete without appearances from some of the “smart people” like the MPAA and Team Prenda? First the MPPA wants more education while they refuse to learn about how the world is changing around them. Then, sometimes, more education doesn’t help as with John Steele, who can’t seem to learn when to stop digging. Then again, you can be, I assume at least, an educated person who supports a very bad idea.

Hopefully next week will be full of posts of smart people, good ideas and less myth busting. Until then, May the Force be With You.

I've been trying to travel less often these days, but I still do way too much of it. Over the past few years, though, I've become more and more obsessed with perfecting my "travel gear" so that I can do things conveniently on the go. This week's awesome stuff post covers three new crowdfunding projects that attempt (some better than others) to create products for travelers that... are quite different than what's come before. Whether or not you agree that any of these are particularly useful, they're the kinds of ideas that will certainly surprise people.

• First up is the Aero-Tray -- a foldup stand mainly for laptops to actually make it easier/more convenient to work on airplanes. I'm often my most productive on airplanes, where I can just sit and focus for hours on end, but the cramped quarters and the fear of the person in front of you pushing their seat back (ugh!) can be quite a pain. The Aero-Tray looks like a pretty cool and unique way of trying to tackle that, while also making your "workspace" on a plane more usable. Of course, it doesn't just have to be for airplanes either. I see this as a possible replacement for the current travel laptop stand that I travel with already. They're also promoting this as a way to take a nap, though that looks kind of goofy. (Disclaimer: I've already backed this project myself, even though I'm a bit nervous about the weight and size of the thing -- but the possibility of being more productive on planes is really tempting). The project was seeking $23,667 (I have no idea why they chose such an odd number), and passed that relatively quickly. It's a bit over $30,000 with less than a week to go.
• Speaking of looking goofy during naps, last year, the really wacky "ostrich pillow" which let you stick your head into a giant pillow-like... thing in order to sleep damn well anywhere you please (if you can get over the embarrassment factor) got a ridiculous amount of attention, and ended up raising about $200,000 on Kickstarter. It looks like a gag gift, but apparently it's real. Either way, the folks behind it have now created the Ostrich Pillow Light. Honestly, if there had never been an Ostrich Pillow in the first place, I think most people would think the Ostrich Pillow Light looks insanely goofy. But, when you compare the two, the new Light one looks way less goofy. Thank goodness for relative goofiness. (Disclaimer: I wouldn't want to be caught dead in one of these, no matter how comfy they might be). Once again, like last year's project, there appears to be a fair amount of demand for this offering. They had a goal of £25,000 and shot past it. As I write this, it's around £60,000, with more than two weeks to go.
• Finally, the folks at Triposo, who make travel apps for mobile phones are offering a wacky travel belt. Basically, it's a belt that has little buzzers in four equally spaced places around the belt. You program into your mobile app where it is you want to go... and as you walk around some new city, it'll buzz you to tell you which way to go -- so you don't (1) look like a lost tourist and (2) miss all the sights while staring into the little map on your phone trying to figure out where to go. Conceptually, that's kind of neat. I'm one of those people who hates looking like a tourist somewhere, and almost always tries to memorize maps before heading out, rather than have to stand around looking lost (sometimes this works... sometimes... it doesn't). Still, the idea of a belt that guides you around still seems a bit far out there for me. (Disclaimer: I actually don't have a disclaimer on this one, but since I did one on the other two items, I felt the need to say something). These guys are trying to get $10,000, and only have about $3,000 as of this writing, with about two and a half weeks to go. That's right on the edge in terms of likely hitting the goal. Wouldn't surprise me either way. Funky product, but might be a really niche market.

That's all for this week. Safe travels.

The latest reporting on the Snowden docs by The Guardian shows that the UK's surveillance operation GCHQ was apparently well aware that its activities were almost certainly open to a "legal challenge" and therefore they were committed to keeping them secret to avoid such a challenge. Note that this is quite different than the official excuse always given about being worried about public disclosure putting national security at risk by revealing "sources and methods." Instead, here it seems clear that the secrecy was for the very reason that many of us suspected: they were pretty sure they're breaking the law, or at least coming so close that it was something the courts would eventually have to decide... but only if the info got out. And, it wasn't just them. They realized that the telcos willingness in passing on info likely opened up other legal challenges as well.

GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone "well beyond" what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.

GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.

GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and America's National Security Agency.

Amazingly, they seem to admit that the fear of a public debate/legal challenge was the key reason they fought (and won) a battle to keep such evidence out of trials. That is, even though they could have gone with the old favorite of "national security," instead, they finally admitted reality:

Our main concern is that references to agency practices (ie the scale of interception and deletion) could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.

That other point mentioned above, about telcos going "above and beyond" in voluntarily handing over access is also pretty big, considering that the telcos in question had tried the "we're just complying with the law" excuse in the past. But, evidently, they were lying.

The revelations of voluntary co-operation with some telecoms companies appear to contrast markedly with statements made by large telecoms firms in the wake of the first Tempora stories. They stressed that they were simply complying with the law of the countries in which they operated.

In reality, numerous telecoms companies were doing much more than that, as disclosed in a secret document prepared in 2009 by a joint working group of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.

Later in the report, a GCHQ memo notes that telcos "feared damage to their brands" if the extent of their over-cooperation was revealed. You know how they could have dealt with that? By not going so far above and beyond the law. But, once again, it seems like the telcos have been incredibly willing to screw over their own customers' privacy at every opportunity.

There aren't many upsides to Snowden's revelations that NSA is essentially spying on the entire Internet, all the time, but if one good thing has already come out of that sorry state of affairs it's the emergence of security expert Bruce Schneier as a mainstream commentator on the digital world. That's largely because his core expertise has been shoved into the very center of our concerns, making his thoughts on what's going on particularly valuable.

One fruitful theme that he has been developing recently is the idea of feudal computing (I imagine it could well turn out to be the subject of his next book.) Schneier first wrote about this even before the NSA story broke, back in November last year. He then revisited the idea shortly after the first Snowden story appeared, and has now returned to the theme again, in what is perhaps his best essay on the subject so far. It's called "Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet," and explores some of the implications of our new digital dystopia -- and what we can do about it. It begins by describing how things were supposed to be:

In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the "natural laws of the Internet" and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.

Unfortunately, as we know, that's not how it worked out. Instead, we have seen the rise of the feudal Internet:

Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. These companies [like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook etc.] act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They're deliberately changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the Internet.

More recently, we have witnessed the dangerous alignment of private and governmental interests and power:

Both corporations and governments want ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn't otherwise. The entertainment industry is looking to governments to enforce their antiquated business models.

A key question is: how did this happen? How did things go so wrong when they seemed to start off so well? Schneier has a good answer:

The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but the rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: they can make use of new technologies faster. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But when the already powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet for their needs, they had more power to magnify. That's the difference: the distributed were more nimble and were quicker to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively.

And that's where we are today, at a point where the big institutions -- governments above all -- have finally overcome their initial cluelessness, and worked out that as well as being a threat to their power, the Internet could also be a means for them to consolidate it. Fortunately, Schneier has some practical suggestions about what we need to do now in order to tip the balance back towards the people:

In the short term, we need more transparency and oversight. The more we know of what institutional powers are doing, the more we can trust that they are not abusing their authority. We have long known this to be true in government, but we have increasingly ignored it in our fear of terrorism and other modern threats. This is also true for corporate power. Unfortunately, market dynamics will not necessarily force corporations to be transparent; we need laws to do that. The same is true for decentralized power; transparency is how we will differentiate political dissidents from criminal organizations.

Oversight is also critically important, and is another long-understood mechanism for checking power. This can be a combination of things: courts that act as third-party advocates for the rule of law rather than rubber-stamp organizations, legislatures that understand the technologies and how they affect power balances, and vibrant public-sector press and watchdog groups that analyze and debate the actions of those wielding power.

Transparency and oversight give us the confidence to trust institutional powers to fight the bad side of distributed power, while still allowing the good side to flourish. For if we are going to entrust our security to institutional powers, we need to know they will act in our interests and not abuse that power. Otherwise, democracy fails.

There's much more in Schneier's essay, including thoughts on the "security gap", and why the longer-term solution is to reduce power differences by opening up data. It's a really important piece that pulls together many of the big issues that Snowden's leaks have raised. Unusually, it not only offers a compelling analysis of what's wrong, but also some sensible, if broad-brush, thoughts on how to put it right.

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Sharing time: I'm quite afraid of a lot of things in this life. Clowns, for instance, as well as female cats that just had kittens. Oddly, the Harris Bank lion has scared me since my childhood. Very small rocks. The American South. But, honestly, I'm not afraid of North Korea. Their threats tend to amount to piss-poor photoshopped pictures and videos that might be terrifying if their own enemies hadn't produced the footage for them. Now, I get that North Korea's government is a horrible threat to its own people and I dream nightly of the day when those people will be freed from their current leader and his never ending Bond-villain impression, but they just don't feel all that threatening to me. Why? Well, because their threats always seem to amount to a dud bottle-rocket, relatively speaking.

Take the latest dire warning out of South Korea, for instance, which amounts to reviled North Korean hackers trying to insert malware into software produced in North Korea for use in DDoS attacks.

In the latest criminal case, a North Korea hacker disguised himself as a software developer and offered to make online gaming programs for the arrested South Korean businessman at much cheaper prices than South Korean software developers, the NPA official said.

The North Korean-developed gaming programs, for which “thousands of dollars” had been paid by the arrested South Korean businessman, were all confiscated before spreading online, he said, adding if the programs had been developed by South Koreans, the price tag would have been much higher.

Er, okay, so "thousands of dollars" were spent by a South Korean on North Korean programming that went nowhere and then the South Korean was arrested. And, yes, South Korea is occasionally the target of DDoS attacks that likely come from the North, but so what? Nobody is buying North Korean games en masse, should such things even exist. And, while I'm sure they have some talented techno-mancers in North Korea, why would using their programmers to produce games when that practice is illegal and likely better talent exists elsewhere ever become a trend?

Now -- and this is just a crazy out there suggestion -- but what if those North Korean programmers actually made a game worth some money, distributed it to those countries still willing to do business with them, and then, oh, I don't know, used the income to feed their own people on occasion? I know that doesn't make you a super-cool mega-villain, Supreme Leader, but at least it'd be more effective than constantly cleaning the egg off your face.

If fruits and vegetables tasted even better, maybe people would include more in their diet. Part of what researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are trying to do is to improve the taste and nutritional profile of specialty crops like fruits and vegetables, in the hope that Americans will adopt a healthier diet. For generations, humans have been inadvertently breeding the nutrients out of fruits and vegetables, by selecting varieties that are more palatable (i.e., higher in sugar and starch). Then, somewhere along the way, appearance became important, and farmers began breeding aesthetically pleasing varieties, often at the expense of taste. So, now we're stuck with some pretty bland products. Here are some more tasty links.

• For the past 70 years or so, people have been breeding tomatoes for a uniform red color, but in the process, a gene that increases sugar content in tomatoes was inactivated. The gene, SlGLK2, increases the formation of chloroplasts, which are responsible for producing sugars through photosynthesis. Researchers have shown that by re-inserting an intact copy of the gene into tomatoes, they could increase the amount of glucose and fructose by up to 40%, while still retaining the uniform color ripening trait. Too bad they weren't actually able to taste them (federal regulations prohibit sampling experimental crops). [url]
• Researchers have found that today's Fuji apples are mealier, less flavorful, and more susceptible to disease than they were in the 1970s. The culprit: climate change. Studies in controlled temperature environments have shown that higher temperatures have been linked to a decrease in taste and texture in apples. Who knows what other crops might also have been changed due to global warming? [url]
• University of Florida researchers have discovered that they can improve the taste of fruits by exposing them to far-red light. They were able to use specific wavelengths of light to manipulate the production of volatile compounds that control aroma and taste in fruits like tomatoes, strawberries, and blueberries. Imagine your produce tasting even better after being stored in your far-red-light-equipped refrigerator! [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

One of the many (weak) tricks in the big ol' Prenda "bag of tricks" is to accuse judges who rule against them of bias, and try to get them thrown off the case. It hasn't worked so far, but the Prenda spirit seems to be to never, ever, ever give up trying the same old bogus crap. So here we are with Paul Hansmeier trying to get magistrate judge Franklin Noel disqualified from the case in Minnesota where he's been a giant pain in the ass for Team Prenda, because he's been digging into their actions to determine if a bunch of Minnesota lawsuits were actually fraud on the court. Noel's been pretty careful and methodical, even as Team Prenda has done their usual tapdance. Remember, Judge Noel was the one who ordered them to show up in court with someone who could answer questions -- and Prenda failed to produce Mark Lutz (who, as far as I can tell, is still missing).

So what was Noel's big crime that should get him thrown off the case? Apparently it was giving a talk about copyright trolls and some of the details of Prenda to the Student Federal Bar Association at the University of Minnesota Law School (added bonus: Paul Hansmeier and John Steele are alumni of that school). They claim that the talk is a form of ex parte communication and shows that Judge Noel has "prejudged" them in part because the emailed description of the event mentioned Prenda's "bad behavior." Even as they admit that Noel probably didn't write the email, they say it's guilt by association.

They also claim that the emailed announcement contains details that Hansmeier insists were only filed under seal in the cases -- suggesting that Judge Noel may have revealed that information:

The e-mail further discloses information about the settlement demands in this case. Yet, Plaintiff’s settlement demands were filed under seal by order of the district court. The e-mail’s author appears to be in possession of non-public sealed information, which a reasonable person might conclude was furnished by the Magistrate Judge, even if it was not.

Of course, the information on settlement demands by Team Prenda can be found widely online. Hansmeier leaves that bit out, of course.

Hansmeier continues to flail wildly around, arguing that Judge Noel has clearly been reading blogs including those "created by individuals who have been caught infringing" because "many of his comments echoed criticisms" on those blogs. Of course, what Hansmeier leaves out is that those same criticisms have now been validated by multiple federal courts. It is not, in any way, out of turn for Judge Noel to make note of that. Later, Hansmeier argues that the cases have generated "notoriety" and uses the example that a letter he sent the judge "was the subject of an immediate feature story on several pirate websites." As far as I know, we here at Techdirt were actually the first to write about that letter. I know Ars Technica picked up on our story and wrote one as well. Neither of our sites are "pirate blogs." We're both media organizations that cover a variety of issues. Earlier in his filing, Hansmeier argued that these pirate blogs were all set up by people who had been accused of infringement. That's a blatantly false statement regarding us, and one hopes that Hansmeier will correct the record, though that seems unlikely.

Back to the issue at hand, it does seem a bit strange, and perhaps unwise, for a judge to give a talk about a case that is still ongoing. But whether or not it actually qualifies for being disqualified from the case seems like a stretch. But, it is the Prenda way: flail and flail and flail some more.

The Washington Post has an interesting article about James Clapper calling intelligence officials around the globe to effectively pre-warn them that cooperative activities with US intelligence agencies are likely to be revealed in the press before long, thanks to Ed Snowden. It's a worthwhile read, but two things struck me about it:

1. It sounds like the NSA might have finally figured out what Snowden took, only five or so months later.
2. They seem to know that (contrary to what they've claimed publicly) Russia does not have access to the trove of Snowden docs. That's not stated explicitly, but the following snippet makes it pretty clear:

   In one case, for instance, the files contain information about a program run from a NATO country against Russia that provides valuable intelligence for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, said one U.S. official, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Snowden faces theft and espionage charges.
   
   “If the Russians knew about it, it wouldn’t be hard for them to take appropriate measures to put a stop to it,” the official said.

   That statement certainly indicates that the Russians haven't taken those appropriate measures... meaning that they don't yet know about it. Of course, Snowden himself recently insisted that he got rid of the docs before going to Russia, but some chose not to believe him. The statements above suggest not only that Snowden was being truthful, but also that administration and Congressional officials who insist that Snowden gave the documents to the Russian are ignorant or lying.

It's funny how a little sunlight and transparency often has a contagious way of revealing even more over time...

We already knew that Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner was getting ready to release a major new anti-NSA spying bill called the USA Freedom Act, and Derek Khanna has just revealed many of the details of the bill, scheduled to be introduced in both houses of Congress this coming Tuesday. It will be backed by Sensenbrenner in the House and Pat Leahy in the Senate, and will have plenty of co-sponsors (already about 50 have signed up) including some who had initially voted against the Amash Amendment back in July. In other words, this bill has a very high likelihood of actually passing, though I imagine that the intelligence community, and potentially the White House, will push back on it. For Congress, gathering up a veto-proof majority may be a more difficult task.

The bill appears to do a number of good things, focusing on limiting the NSA's ability to do dragnet collections, rather than specific and targeted data collection, while also significantly increasing transparency of the activities of the NSA as well as the FISA court when it comes to rulings that interpret the law.

• End bulk data collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. This is the program that collects metadata on every phone call based on a twisted interpretation of the law and a thorough revisionist dictionary for words like "targeted," "relevance," "search" and "surveillance." Sensenbrenner, who crafted much of the original PATRIOT Act insists that when he wrote it, it was intended to already ban this kind of dragnet. The new bill will make that explicit. Similarly, it appears that the bill will require the intelligence community to be much more proactive in filtering out unnecessary information and deleting information collected incidentally.
  
  
• Fixing the FISC: As many have recommended, the law would make sure that a public advocate can be present to be an adversarial presence, arguing in favor of protecting Americans' privacy. There will be a special Office of the Special Advocate (OSA) created for this role. Somewhat surprisingly, the OSA will even be allowed to appeal decisions that the FISA court makes if it believes they stray from the law or the Constitution. That could be a very big deal.
  
  Separately, the DOJ will be required to declassify all FISC decisions from the past decade that involve "a significant construction or interpretation of the law." That is, no more secret law-making by the FISC.
  
  
• Greater transparency for companies on the receiving end of demands for information. This would make it so companies that get orders to hand over information can reveal numbers of requests, effectively stopping the existing gag orders which prevent us from knowing how often the NSA is demanding info from internet companies.

This legislation doesn't solve all the problems, but it does clearly attack the most egregious actions by the NSA and the wider intelligence community. I imagine those in that community will fight back hard on this. We'll be hearing outrageous claims about how people will die if they can't spy on all of us. But, in the end, if the NSA hadn't continued to expand its spying efforts, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.

Here's a bizarre footnote to a bizarre footnote in the ongoing legal fight between Aereo and the TV broadcasters. As you may recall, Aereo has relied heavily on the precedent in the 2nd Circuit in the Cablevision case, which effectively ruled that Cablevision's remote DVR was legal. The first bizarre footnote was that in the district court case, Cablevision actually sided with the broadcasters. We pointed out that this was fairly cynical and obnoxious by Cablevision, as it appeared that the company was just trying to protect its turf from a competitor by arguing that its own remote DVR was legal, but this competitor's was illegal. Of course we left out one adjective.

It wasn't just cynical and obnoxious, it was monumentally shortsighted. That's because anyone who had spent more than about 30 seconds understanding the details of the case knew that the broadcasters weren't just focused on Aereo -- but rather were looking to use Aereo to overturn the Cablevision ruling. They were pretty explicit about this all along -- and even some of the judges understand this.

Now that the NY case has been appealed to the Supreme Court, and it's abundantly clear that the networks are aiming to take down the Cablevision ruling, Cablevision appears to finally have recognized what a monumentally stupid move it made in supporting their arguments earlier in the case (even if the networks lost). Rather than admit that it was in error, it appears that Cablevision has decided to cover up their flip flop by just screaming much more loudly against the very networks it sided with earlier in this case. It's come out with a scathing statement blasting the networks for their appeal, and arguing that the networks were engaged in a "willful attempt to stifle innovation." That's almost exactly the opposite of what it said before.

Cablevision's media wranglers would probably argue that its amicus brief in support of the networks was merely focused on a different argument: that Aereo didn't meet the same qualifications as Cablevision, but it's bizarre to think they didn't realize that the point of the case was to take down the victory Cablevision got in its case. Furthermore, a win for Aereo would actually be huge for Cablevision, because it would allow them to start offering a similar service, and get out from under crazy retransmission fees.