The FBI Database: How the Government is Spying on You
The FBI is watching you.
Well, maybe not you in particular, but there’s a new technique they’re using that may have you concerned.
A brief description of the FBI
The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the primary investigative arm of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). In basic terms, they are the lead agency in charge of law enforcement in the United States. Their motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity”.
The controversial government spying technique
There is a new Internet surveillance technique that the FBI is using to collect data on Americans. You might think they’re using this data collection in order to find out what a particular criminal suspect is doing and they are recording this for investigative and evidence purposes. The problem here is that FBI agents are collected data on the activities of thousands of users on the internet at one time. They are then placing these web histories of unsuspecting innocent people in huge government databases. These allegations have been collaborated by current and former government officials.
Types of data collected on citizens
The information they may have on you may include your name, email address and keywords you are searching for.
The FBI used to use the Carnivore surveillance system (renamed to DCS1000) but this new method of internet data collection is broader and more controversial than even that system.
This approach by the FBI is called the vacuum-cleaner approach by some. It is used when there’s a court order given to police to gather information on a suspect. However, if an ISP (Internet Service Provider, like AOL) can’t isolate that person due to technical issues, they use this type of shotgun-scanning system.
The FBI can then record this information, which will include all Internet traffic, at the ISP side. They can then set it up to collect data on web browsing habits, emails, or instant messaging.
The law school symposium that started the scandal
Stanford University law school had a symposium called “Beyond a Physical Conception of the 4th Amendment: Search & Seizure in the Digital Age”. Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado law professor who was a commenter at the symposium said that federal agents use this kind of “full-pipe recording” as a default method for surveillance. “You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment,” Ohm said. “If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses (Internet Protocol addresses; a computer’s unique numerical address), you don’t throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact. You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you’re trying to monitor. The question that’s interesting…is whether this is illegal, whether it’s constitutional. Is Congress even aware they’re doing this?”
“What they’re doing is even worse than Carnivore,” said Kevin Bankston, a Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney. “What they’re doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets.”
Carnivore version two
The federal bureau dropped the Carnivore project two years ago. The bureau then basically outsourced this by having the Internet Service Providers do the surveillance and then reimburse the companies for the costs of such an operation.
Federal law versus the FBI
Federal law states that the FBI must perform “minimization”. Minimization decrees that federal agents must “minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception” and keep the supervising judge informed. This gives some privacy by intending to limit eavesdropping on innocent conversations. The current rules allow FBI agents to listen to a phone call up to two minutes, with one minute in between the sessions. An interesting observation with this federal law is that it mentions real-time interception – meaning agents actively listening to calls at the moment they occur. The law does not authorize the collection of huge information databases on thousands of innocent people. The closest the law comes to mentioning such a practice is: “In the event the intercepted communication is in a code or foreign language, and an expert in that foreign language or code is not reasonably available during the interception period, minimization may be accomplished as soon as practicable after such interception.”
Some government officials feel the language authorizes the database collection. “Take a look at the legislative history from the mid ’90s,” says DOJ assistant deputy chief Richard Downing. “It’s pretty clear from that that Congress very much intended it to apply to electronic types of wiretapping.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney disagrees with that assessment. Kevin Bankston feels the FBI is “collecting and apparently storing indefinitely the communications of thousands–if not hundreds of thousands - of innocent Americans in violation of the Wiretap Act and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.”
There might be a middle ground in this debate. The director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., Marc Rotenberg, feels that a balanced way of conducting this is to require FBI agents to only come in contact with the information that is permitted by court order. “The obligation should be on both the (Internet provider) and the government to make sure that only the information responsive to the warrant is disclosed to the government,” says Rotenberg.
How Musicians Are Causing Copyright Law Controversy
Round One: Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails v. The Music Industry (RIAA).
And so far, the public is supporting the bands.
What’s going on with Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails?
Well Radiohead recently just did a really innovative act, they’ve taken their new album In Rainbows, and placed on their website - and you can pay any price for it! Yes, that price includes absolutely nothing -as in FREE. Yes, a free Radiohead album for download online.
I just found about a survey in the United Kingdom that said that about 33% of all the people who downloaded Radiohead’s album online did pay some money to the band, up to as much as £20 ($40 in United States Dollars). There’s even reports that one downloader purchased the album for £100 ($200 USD)!
Nine Inch Nails (NIN) seems to be following in similar suit. Trent Reznor, head of NIN, has released a statement concerning their freedom from their label contract and future musical direction concerning their Year Zero album:
“Right now nine inch nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to finally be able to have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.”
What’s the result from what Radiohead did with the free albums stunt? Did they lose money?
Initial reports are that they actually may be making the same amount of money they would have made normally, with following months possibly bringing even more of a profit! Their success with this marketing may find other bands and musicians going independent, possibly bypassing major record labels and self-release their own products. This may be the beginning of a paradigm shift for musicians and the music industry. Most musicians have grown up with the classic notion:
- Make some music.
- Grind it out for years and years at clubs and bars until a major label finds you.
- Sign with the label and give over a majority of your record sale profits to them.
- Make your money from concert sales.
This turns this on it’s head. It’s known that concert ticket prices are at an all-time high. This is due to the immense failure of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) to protect the interests of the artists. The RIAA has the major labels as their main concern. It seems that the time has come for artists to make their own way.
Are all musicians this open-minded?
Well, did you hear about the Metallica vs Napster battle a little while ago? That created huge negative backlash for the band and the repercussions are still around today.
In 2000, Metallica noticed a demo for their song “I Disappear” was floating around the Napster P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing network. After more searching, they found their entire album available for free download on Napster. Metallica filed legal action against Napster, demanded the 300,000 users with Metallica songs be banned, and they also filed legal action against Yale University, University of Southern California, and Indiana University for not doing enough to stop internet file sharing from going on in their campuses. Metallica drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich then provided a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
My band authored the music which is Napster’s lifeblood. We should decide what happens to it, not Napster — a company with no rights in our recordings, which never invested a penny in Metallica’s music or had anything to do with its creation. The choice has been taken away from us.
What about the users of Napster, the music consumers? It’s like each of them won one of those contests where you get turned loose in a store for five minutes and get to keep everything you can load into your shopping cart. With Napster, though, there’s no time limit and everyone’s a winner-except the artist. Every song by every artist is available for download at no cost and, of course, with no payment to the artist, the songwriter or the copyright holder.
If you’re not fortunate enough to own a computer, there’s only one way to assemble a music collection the equivalent of a Napster user’s: theft. Walk into a record store, grab what you want and walk out. The difference is that the familiar phrase a computer user hears, “File’s done,” is replaced by another familiar phrase-”You’re under arrest.”
This caused huge headaches for the band, as tons of parodies were produced on the internet, making fun of Metallica and “Lar$ Ulrich” and the culmination being named #17 on Blender magazine’s list of “biggest wusses in rock” for its “anti-Napster crusade”.
What gave even more ammunition to the anti-Lars Ulrich crowd is an interview where he admits to not a be a user of computers and the internet:
Everybody always attacks me on it, and I’m totally open and frank, the computer is not something that gets a lot of use in my house. The Internet is not something that I utilize very much as a tool. That’s fair enough. Now certainly I have been accused of being ignorant on certain computer things, that’s all fair enough, but once again it’s sort of sad and pathetic that it becomes the best counter argument that people come up with ‘how can he be against a company like Napster if he’s never been on there?’ It’s like, because, my fucking songs are being traded around, you know, hundreds of thousands of them a day against my free fucking will, against my wishes. I think people lose sight of that with all these arguments, all these analogies, all these things that people try to come up with and be clever.
So what’s next for the music industry?
It’s definitely going to be an interesting time in the world of copyright right and the rights of musicians to protect their creative work and interests. Will more musicians join the Radiohead side and adapt with the times? Or will more musicians join the Metallica side and attack the new wave of internet music distribution?
What is the future of the music industry?
Clone Website Causes Major Lawsuit Mess For Doctor
From May it Please the Court:
If ever there was a horror story about stealing a website, then this case is it: Del Junco v. Hufnagel. Dr. Tirso Del Junco, Jr. is a highly qualified surgeon who assists women with alternative surgeries instead of hysterectomies. For reasons not stated in the opinion, another individual, V. Georges Hufnagel, who had her medical license revoked in California and New York and disciplinary proceedings pending against her in the state of Hawaii, tried to steal Dr. Del Junco’s website.
Dr. Del Junco had a website entitled drdeljuncojr.com. Hufnagel started a mimic-style website without the “jr” part of Dr. Del Junco’s URL. On her mimic website, she defamed Dr. Del Junco and claimed he was not a vascular surgeon (he is) and he had no specialized training (he does). Unfortunately for Dr. Del Junco, his business started to fall off and he suffered financially as a result of the traffic directed away from his website by the mimic website.
He consequently brought a lawsuit against Ms. Hufnagel and obtained an injunction to prevent her from maintaining the mimic website and continuing to defame him.
That’s when the trouble doubled (in the first link above, skip down to page 5). A prior court had found Hufnagel was a “vexatious litigant,” and this case proved to be more of the same. She filed a 140-page response to the motion for injunction (you’re allowed only 15 pages). When the court granted Dr. Del Junco’s injunction, she ignored it. She failed to show up for hearings. She filed papers that didn’t comply with court rules. To top it off, she filed and withdrew pleadings at will and without the court’s permission.
Then she hired an attorney, but things didn’t get better. The attorney and Hufnagel succeeded in delaying the proceedings further. Finally, the trial court stepped in and struck her answer and entered her default. Not surprisingly, she appealed.
The court of appeal had no problem sustaining the trial court’s primary orders.
As the justices observed about Hufnagel, “from the start of the case to the time the trial court struck Hufnagel’s answer and entered default, Hufnagel showed no interest in taking part in the case or in following orders of the court. All of her actions were those of an obstructionist, not a participant in the process. She filed documents in propria persona that did not follow proper form, were lengthy, contained irrelevant information, and violated court rules. She filed documents without serving them. She failed to comply with the injunction and continued to operate the counterfeit web site. She did not pay sanctions when ordered. When she had counsel, things did not improve. Misrepresentations were made to the court, documents were not filed when promised, responses to interrogatories were never delivered, and phone calls were not returned. The actions of Hufnagel and her counsel were willful and deliberate, caused unnecessary delay, and wasted the trial court’s resources. The actions caused Dr. Del Junco to incur unnecessary expense.”
His final award? $358,724.90, after the court of appeal struck the trial court’s award of punitive damages due to a lack of proof of Hufnagel’s financial worth.
I’ll bet she refused to produce documents detailing her financial worth during the underlying lawsuit.
Here’s the good doctor’s new website, Alternative Surgery.
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