Bradley Manning to Face All Charges in Court-Martial

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted from a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. An Army officer is recommending a general court-martial for Manning, a low-ranking intelligence analyst charged in the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP

 

WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning is headed for a general court-martial, according to the commander of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington in an announcement released late Friday.

Maj. Gen. Michael Linnington, the general convening authority for the district, made the determination that Manning will face all 22 charges leveled against him, include aiding the enemy, wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing that it is accessible to the enemy, theft of public property or records, transmitting defense information, and fraud and related activity in connection with computers.

The most serious charge — aiding the enemy — carries a possible death penalty. Prosecutors have said they will not seek the death penalty. Instead, Manning faces life in prison if convicted of all the charges.

Linnington’s decision was no surprise to court watchers. In mid-January, the presiding officer of Manning’s Article 32 hearing, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, recommended that Manning be court-martialed under all 22 charges, indicating that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Manning committed the offenses with which he was charged.

His recommendation was subsequently upheld by the special court-martial convening authority Col. Carl R. Coffman, commander of Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, who passed his recommendation in late January to Gen. Linnington. Linnington’s is the final decision in the matter.

It’s not known when Manning’s court-martial proceedings will begin, but the speedy-trial rule under the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires that suspects be tried within 120 days of being arrested or 120 days of the “preferral of charges.”

It’s unclear how many days are left on Manning’s 120-day clock. He was arrested May 26, 2010, more than 400 days ago. But the countdown on his proceedings was halted at least twice, according to the Army. The first time was shortly after his arrest when his defense attorney requested a so-called “706-board” hearing to determine Manning’s mental health at the time of the alleged leaks. It was nearly eight months before the military conducted that hearing and several months more before it made its determination that he was mentally fit.

The clock also stopped for a period during which discovery evidence was being prepared and passed to the defense and security clearances were being obtained. The Army did not respond to inquiries asking how much time is left on the 120-day clock. A military expert with the Army told reporters last December that one of the first things Manning’s attorney likely would do if the court-martial goes forward is file a motion protesting the amount of time the military has held his client without a trial.

Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks, including the headline-making “Collateral Murder” video showing a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

In online chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo,  Manning boasted of leaking a separate video related to the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession, as well as the large databases that later formed WikiLeaks’ most high-profile releases. Those include over 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War and some 90,000 reports from the Afghanistan War.

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Oklahoma Lawmaker Proposes Tax on Violent Video Games


Grand Theft Auto. Image: Screenshot

An Oklahoma lawmaker is proposing taxing violent video games in that state to fund obesity and bullying programs.

The proposal (pdf) by House Rep. William Fourkiller comes seven months after the Supreme Court said that states could not ban the sale of violent video games to minors. The Supreme Court ruled in June that California could not declare the games obscene to exempt them from First Amendment protection.

Rep. William Fourkiller. Photo: Courtesy of Rep. Fourkiller

For the same and other reasons, Fourkiller’s measure, which has not had a hearing, isn’t likely to pass constitutional muster even if it becomes law.

“It violates the First Amendment to say that one thing should get special treatment because of the speech involved,” Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer in New York, said in a telephone interview.

In 1968, a Supreme Court ruling allowed the states to adopt laws that keep “obscene” sexual content away from kids. However, that ruling in a New York case did not address violent content of video games like Grand Theft Auto and instead dealt with magazines.

Fourkiller’s proposal levies a 1 percent charge on a violent video game, which is one “that has received a rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board of Teen, Mature or Adult Only.”

Fourkiller did not immediately respond for comment. He told KFOR Channel 4 in Oklahoma City that the games promote child obesity and bullying, and that they desensitize gamers. He mentioned Rockstar’s Bully game.

“Not everybody is going to react the same,” Fourkiller said. “But I believe after hours and hours of watching the screen, playing the video game, being that person and taking on that role, people get desensitized.”

The proceeds are earmarked for two youth-related obesity and bullying programs.

One is for the “purpose of promoting outdoor education initiatives and nature-oriented physical programs for school-age children.” The other, according to the measure’s text, is “for the purpose of supporting efforts to prevent bullying in the schools in this state.”

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Anonymous Eavesdrops on FBI Anti-Anonymous Strategy Meeting


As FBI and Scotland Yard investigators recently plotted out a strategy for tracking suspects linked to Anonymous, little did they know that members of the group were eavesdropping on their conference call and recording their plans.

The online vigilante group has released a 17-minute clip of a Jan. 17 conference call between investigators discussing evidence gathered against members of the group as well as upcoming plans for arrests. The group also released an e-mail sent out by an FBI agent to law enforcement agents around the world with a phone number and password for accessing the conference call.

The FBI has confirmed to the Associated Press that the recording is authentic.

AnonymousIRC, a Twitter account purporting to be connected to the group, sent out a tweet on Friday with a link to an audio recording of the call, followed later by a message that read, “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

The call, between participants named Stewart and Bruce from Scotland Yard and the Los Angeles office of the FBI, began with the callers laughing over an inside joke about McDonald’s and cheese, then moved on to a discussion about a cyberconference in Sheffield. A few minutes later another agent from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., joined in.

At that point, the participants began talking about Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two U.K. suspects linked to Anonymous. The investigators also discussed setting back arrests connected to two suspects known online as Tflow and Kayla. On the call the agents appeared to give the real names of these suspects, but Anonymous bleeped them out. The U.K. investigator notes that local authorities have made a secret application to a judge to request a delay in proceedings to assist the FBI.


Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

“We’ve set back the further arrests of Kayla and Tflow, that being [redacted] and [redacted], until we know what’s happening,” the U.K. investigator said. “We’ve got our prosecution counsel making an application in chambers, without defense knowing, to seek a way to try and factor some time in that won’t look suspicious.”

“How much time do you think is reasonable?” the U.S. caller asked.

“I’ve gone and said eight weeks, if they come back and say they’ll only give us six weeks I think it still helps you guys out…,” was the reply. “We have got Ryan Cleary’s indecent images, which have been found partly by our guys and partly by the USAF team who looked at his hard drive. So what we’re going to propose is that they get dealt with first, historically they’re the older offenses, and then that would take six to eight weeks before we then rolled onto the second half of that. But it’s down to the trial judge.”

The FBI agent thanked the Yard investigator for being flexible and helping out U.S. authorities.

“Hey, we’re here to help,” the Yard investigator responded. “We’ve cocked things up in the past, we know that. It gives us more time to examine the chat logs in any event, so it’s not that much of a hardship.”

The discussion then turned to another 15-year-old suspect who used the online moniker Tehwongz, and who was apparently arrested in the U.K. before Christmas for DDoSing his school and allegedly defacing the website of a Manchester-based credit union. The U.K. agent explained that the hacker wrote a statement revealing how he became a hacker and allegedly asserting that he was responsible for the hack of the gaming site Steam, which suffered a breach last year.

The FBI investigator noted that the agency’s Baltimore office was looking into the compromise and would be interested in seeing the hacker’s statement.

“He’s just a pain in the bum,” the Yard investigator said in the call, adding that investigators had a copy of the suspect’s hard drive and would look at prosecuting him for the Steam hack if they can make evidence against him.

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Online Market for Pre-Owned Digital Music Hangs in the Balance

The future of a one-of-a-kind website enabling the online sale of pre-owned digital-music files is in the hands of a federal judge.

ReDigi, which opened in October, provides account holders with a platform to buy and sell used MP3s that were purchased lawfully through iTunes. The platform’s technology does not support other music.

Among other points, the case weighs the so-called first-sale doctrine, the legal theory that people in lawful possession of copyright material have the right to sell it.

A federal judge sided with that principle in 2008, when it debunked UMG Recordings’ claim that it retained perpetual ownership of promotional CDs it releases before an album’s debut. Last year, however, a different court ruled against now-defunct online service Zediva, which streamed movies to customers via DVDs that Zediva had purchased.

In the ReDigi case, Capitol Records sued the Massachusetts-based startup last month in New York federal court. Claiming ReDigi was liable for contributing to copyright infringement, the label is demanding U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan immediately order ReDigi to remove Capitol-owned material, and to also award damages of up to $150,000 per track against the startup.

A ruling could come any day.

Larry Rudolph, the 15-employee company’s chief technology officer, seemed confident of the outcome.

“We let others sit around biting their nails,” he said in an e-mail.

Capitol appears equally as confident. It told Judge Sullivan that ReDigi is not the “equivalent of a used record store,” as ReDigi claims.

“ReDigi is actually a clearinghouse for copyright infringement and a business model built on widespread, unauthorized copying of sound recordings owned by plaintiff and others. Plaintiff brings this lawsuit to halt defendant’s ongoing infringement of plaintiff’s copyrighted works and to recover damages for the harm caused by defendant’s activities,”(.pdf) Capitol attorney Richard Mandel wrote.

ReDigi explained to Sullivan in court papers that its undisclosed number of account holders have a right to upload their purchased iTunes files into ReDigi’s cloud. And when a file is sold to another ReDigi account holder, no copy is made. What’s more, because of ReDigi’s technology, the original uploaded file that is sold cannot be accessed by the seller any more through ReDigi or via the seller’s iTunes account.

“ReDigi’s structure ensures that no copies of an Eligible File are made when one ReDigi user sells an Eligible File stored in the user’s Cloud Locker to another ReDigi user through the ReDigi Marketplace,” its attorney, Ray Beckerman, wrote in a court filing. (.pdf)  ”When such a file is purchased by another user, the file pointer associating the Eligible File with the seller’s Cloud Locker is modified to associate the file with the purchaser’s Cloud Locker. In such a transaction only the pointer is changed; the Eligible File remains in the same location in the ReDigi Cloud and is not copied.”

Beckerman, in a telephone interview, said ReDigi does everything it can to block the unauthorized duplication of files in the ReDigi marketplace. Beckerman added that ReDigi’s technology cannot stop customers from file sharing or copying iTunes music purchases before they had uploaded them to the service.

“You can’t stop the world from committing copyright infringement,” he said. “But it’s impossible to infringe through ReDigi.”

Prices for songs vary on ReDigi, with some files having asking prices as high as 87 cents. The company, which earns up to 15 percent per sale, also offers cloud-storage music streaming.

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Feds Seize 307 Sports-Related Domains Ahead of Super Sunday

Photo: Matt McGee/Flickr

Federal authorities said Thursday they had seized and shuttered 307 domains, 16 allegedly engaged in unauthorized live sports streaming and the remainder accused of selling fake professional sports merchandise, including National Football League paraphernalia.

The seizure, the biggest to date under the Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown known as Operation in Our Sites (.pdf), brings to more than 650 domains shuttered since the program began in June 2010. The latest seizures, which quietly began in October, were announced days ahead of Super Sunday, when the New England Patriots play the New York Giants in the NFL Super Bowl, one of the world’s most popular sporting events.

“While most people are focusing on whether the Patriots or Giants will win on Sunday, we at ICE have our sights on a different type of victory: defeating the international counterfeiting rings that illegally profit off of this event, the NFL, its players and sports fans,” said ICE Director Morton. “In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional. It’s the law.”

The sites allegedly sold fake jerseys, caps, shirts, jackets and other paraphernalia. The government said it had also seized $4.8 million worth of fake NFL goods, up from $3.72 million the same time a year ago.

Federal authorities are taking .com, .org. and .net domains under the same civil-seizure law the government invokes to seize brick-and-mortar drug houses, bank accounts and other property tied to alleged illegal activity. The feds are able to seize the domains because Verisign, which controls the .net and .com names, and the Public Interest Registry, which runs .org, are U.S.-based organizations. Under civil forfeiture laws, the person losing the property has to prove that the items were not used to commit crimes.

The program come under intense scrutiny in December, when Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) asked the government why it kept a hip-hop music site’s domain for a year without affording its New York-based owner a chance to challenge the seizure of dajaz1. Another site, Rojadirecta, a Spanish sports-streaming site, is contesting its seizure last year, saying it is innocent of infringement and only provided links to streaming sites to which it has no affiliation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaves behind a message to online visitors that a site has been seized. Those messages have received more 77 million page views, the government said.

The government said Thursday that a Michigan man, Yonjo Quiroa, 28, was arrested and charged with a single count of criminal copyright infringement for operating nine sites that streamed sporting events without authorization.

A list of the seized sites is here. (.pdf)

 

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VeriSign Hit by Hackers in 2010

Photo: a_sorense/Flickr

Internet giant VeriSign was hacked repeatedly in 2010 resulting in the theft of undisclosed information and raising questions about the integrity of security certificates issued by the company as well as its domain name service.

The breaches were disclosed in vague language in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last October in accordance with new SEC guidelines requiring companies to report intrusions to investors, according to Reuters.

The filing doesn’t say when in 2010 the breaches occurred, but administrators didn’t alert top management until September 2011, although the document indicates administrators were aware of, and responded to, the breaches shortly after they occurred in 2010. The company’s former chief technology officer, Ken Silva, who was with VeriSign until November 2010, was unaware of the breaches until Reuters contacted him for its story.

VeriSign told Reuters the company did “not believe these attacks breached servers that support our Domain Name System Network.” DNS is responsible for delivering web surfers to the correct sites they’re seeking. DNS converts requested URLs, such as www.amazon.com, into the correct IP address so that users trying to reach the retailer will have their browsers directed to that company’s website.

A breach of the DNS network could allow attackers to redirect users to malicious web pages or redirect and intercept e-mail communications.

Just as important are the security certificates that VeriSign issued at the time. Such certificates verify the legitimacy of secure web pages such as https://google.com, so that browsers know they’ve reached a legitimate site. An attacker who manages to subvert a certificate-issuing authority can issue a bogus certificate that would allow him to pose as a legitimate site and trick people into entering usernames and passwords into an impostor site.

VeriSign sold its certificate-issuing business to Symantec in August 2010. A Symantec spokeswoman told Reuters that “there is no indication” that the breach “was related to the acquired SSL product production systems.” The spokeswoman did not indicate how the company could be sure this part of the business was not affected, however.

VeriSign would not be the first certificate authority hacked. Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar was hacked in July 2011. The attackers were able to obtain several hundred fraudulent certificates for top internet entities such as Google, Mozilla, Yahoo and even the privacy and anonymizing service Tor.

Fraudulent certificates also played an important role in the super worm Stuxnet, which used certificates stolen from two companies in Taiwan. The authors of the worm, which was designed to attack centrifuges in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used the certificates to sign a driver in their malware so that systems the worm was trying to infect would believe that the malicious file was a legitimate one from these two companies.

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Copyright: To the Batmobile!

Photo: Courtesy Gotham Garage

A federal judge is siding with DC Comics in its copyright suit against the maker of replica Batmobile “modification kits” for automobiles, saying the iconic Batman superhero vehicle is protected by copyright.

DC Comics sued Mark Towle, the operator of Gotham Garage that in court papers is accused of selling “unlicensed replica vehicle modification kits based on vehicle design copyrights from plaintiff’s Batman property, including various iterations of the fictional automobile, the Batmobile.”

In refusing to dismiss the case, U.S. District Judge Ronald S. W. Lew of Los Angeles wrote Thursday that DC Comics “pleads sufficient facts to support the allegation that defendant violated an exclusive right of plaintiff’s copyright ownership.” (.pdf)

Towle, who did not respond for comment, argued that the Batmobile, as a vehicle, is not subject to copyright protection. “The court finds, however, that defendant’s argument lacks merit,” the judge said.

Lew noted that, generally, copyright law does not apply to “useful articles” such as autos.

But the judge said that he could make a “reasonable inference that there may be non-functional artistic elements of the Batmobile that may possibly be separated from the utilitarian aspect of the automobile. As such, the court finds that the Batmobile and all of its relevant embodiments are not, as a matter of law, excluded from copyright protection.”

Judge Lew did not indicate which “embodiments” of the Batmobile subject it to copyright protection. The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the decision, noted that the judge was alluding to elements of the vehicle that are “pictorially unique” and serve no real-world, utilitarian purpose.

The opinion does not necessarily mean DC Comics wins its lawsuit (.pdf)  that also alleged trademark infringement. However, the judge’s ruling doesn’t provide much hope for Towle, who can settle with DC Comics or defend himself at a copyright infringement trial. Under the Copyright Act, offenders face a maximum $150,000 in penalties for each violation.

The Batmobile first appeared in 1966 in the television series Batman starring Adam West, and has been in numerous Batman motion pictures.


Adam West and Burt Ward with the original Batmobile. Photo: Courtesy ABC

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Supreme Court of Sweden Upholds Pirate Bay Prison Sentences

Sweden’s Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the prison sentences of the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing service on Hollywood’s and the recording industry’s most-hated list.

Peter Sunde faces eight months; Fredrik Neij, 10 months; Carl Lundström, four months; and Gottfrid Svartholm, one year. They share combined fines of more than $6.8 million.

They were convicted in 2009 in a joint civil and criminal proceeding in Sweden that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants.

Lundström’s lawyer, Per E. Samuelsson, blasted the Supreme Court for refusing to review the conviction. “The verdict is absurd,” he said. “I am disappointed that the court is so uninterested in dissecting and analysing the legal twists and turns of one of the world’s most high-profile legal cases of all time.”

Sunde wrote in a blog post that ” … I’m just a pawn. But at least I’m a pawn on the morally right side. I am proud as hell of what I have done and I would not change my involvement in any way.”

The defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way BitTorrent works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay’s servers. Instead the site merely provided an index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user’s client software to the content.

But the judge in the case did not buy it. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall argued successfully that the defendants were culpable anyway, citing past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend’s coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable.

Among other arguments on appeal, the founders asserted that the trial judge was biased against them.

Days after the convictions, attorneys for the four charged that Tomas Norstrom, the judge presiding over the trial, was hostile to the defense because of his affiliations with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

The defendants also charged that the Stockholm trial court administrators secretly steered the case to Norstrom.

It was not immediately clear when the four would be required to surrender.

Torrent Freak noted that the site was still online, but was redirecting to a .se domain out of fear of a “possible seizure from the U.S. authorities.”

Photo: m.a.r.c./Flickr

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Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

Google wrote Jan. 9 it would begin redirecting Blogger traffic to country-specific URLs, meaning whatever country you’re in, you’ll get that country’s domain for Blogger-hosted blogs.

TechDows reports that this is now happening in India, for example. So when you’re there and click on a Blogger blog, the URL will end .in.

Doing that, Google wrote, means content can be removed “on a per country basis.”

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” Google wrote.

Twitter did not announce how its new technology functions, but said Twitter has the ability to remove tweets only in countries where that content was barred.

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Megaupload Server Purge Delayed

A scheduled purging of Megaupload’s data was tentatively shelved Tuesday to give its millions of account holders an opportunity to attempt to retrieve their content from the file-sharing service, whose top officials were indicted on criminal copyright charges.

The authorities shuttered the Hong Kong-based site Jan. 19, and indicted seven of its top officials in what the Justice Department said was “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.”

As part of its prosecution, the government had copied an undisclosed amount of data from Megaupload’s servers in the United States.

The entire contents of Megaupload were set to be purged later this week by Carpathia and Cogent, two of Megaupload’s U.S.-based server hosts. The United States has frozen Megaupload’s assets, and it has been unable to pay its hosting bill, said Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s attorney.

Rothken said in a telephone interview he is negotiating with the government to unfreeze Megaupload assets to keep Megaupload’s servers active so the company can “deliver consumer data back to consumers.” He said the two companies have agreed not to purge data for at least two weeks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday it would assist those attempting to retrieve their data, but could not promise results to the estimated 150 million account holders.

Julie Samuels, an EFF attorney, said in a telephone interview it was unclear what data the authorities copied from Megaupload’s servers, and said it was too early to say what access the authorities have to data uploaded by individual account holders.

Jay Prabhu, chief of the Justice Department’s Cybercrime Unit, said in a court filing that search warrants authorized the government to seize “selected data.”

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