Sen. Barack Obama is taking heat from liberal supporters for changing his position on granting phone companies involved in President Bush's domestic spying program retroactive immunity for breaking federal laws.
According to a New York Times article published Wednesday, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on Obama's own campaign Web site to protest his recent move to support legislation that will grant legal immunity to phone companies involved in the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program after the September 11 attacks.
Sen. Barack Obama
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)Previously, Obama opposed any immunity for the telecom companies. In February, Obama voted on a Senate bill against retroactive immunity. And when asked for CNET News.com's 2008 Technology Voters' Guide whether he supported "giving (phone companies) retroactive immunity for any illicit cooperation with intelligence agencies or law enforcement, " he answered "No."
During the primary, Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the Times story said. But now he has switched his position to support a compromise bill that was worked out between the White House and Democratic Congressional leaders.
The bill is expected to be voted on by the Senate on Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday, the article said.
Disappointed Obama supporters told the Times that they see the shift in the telecom immunity issue as a test of Obama's principles in opposing Bush's surveillance program. The article quotes Markos Moulitsas, a blogger and founder of DailyKos.com, as saying that he has decided to cut back the amount of money he gives to the Obama campaign.
While supporters may be frustrated and angry by Obama's apparent flip-flop on this issue, they won't find any more consistency in Sen. John McCain, Obama's presidential opponent on the Republican side.
My colleague Declan McCullagh pointed out in his blog last month that when news about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program became public years ago, McCain was critical of it. Initially, he said that the courts should decide whether or not AT&T and others accused of violating laws should be held accountable for their participation in the domestic spying program. He also said publicly that it should be made clear to the phone companies that any immunity granted should explicitly state that this was not a "blessing" of their practices and that there should be oversight hearings on the issue.
But over the course of the campaign, McCain's position has changed. In February, he voted for retroactive immunity--even though there were no explicit statements telling AT&T and other telecommunications companies that this is not a "blessing." And there was no deal providing for "oversight hearings," nor were there "provisions" to ensure this won't happen again.
And we thought the YouTube and Facebook presidential debates were all that.
The latest in debate 2.0 is a campaign face-off on Twitter sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum that started Friday and is expected to go on at least through the end of the organization's annual conference on Tuesday night.
With a focus on technology and government, the debate is being moderated by Time magazine blogger Anna Marie Cox. The McCain campaign is represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign is represented by Mike Nelson, a Georgetown University professor who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.
It's yet another interesting use of technology to engage voters in the campaign, so long as they don't mind sorting through posts that while succinct (Twitter has a 140-character limit for individual Tweets), are already plentiful. And we can only hope that the geek community's beloved Twitter doesn't crash amid the traffic.
Once Barack Obama started Twittering, John McCain created a MySpace page, and Hillary Clinton joined Facebook, it became apparent that the 2008 presidential election was relying heavily on social media. But now, a Pew survey has the numbers to prove it, concluding that 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet for politics so far this election season, with topics like Obama and online videos taking a front seat.
The poll, conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project, was based on information provided by Princeton Survey Research Associates.
Earlier this spring, the surveyors contacted 2,251 Americans to find out how they are using the Web to investigate and communicate about the election. The survey results found that almost half are turning to the Web to get information about the presidential race. That's a significant jump from the spring of the 2004 election, when only one-third of adults said they looked online for election news.
Several of the conclusions show numbers doubling or tripling from the last presidential election season. One of these was in the area of online political videos. In 2004, only 13 percent of adults said they watched online videos concerning the election, but this year, already 35 percent use sites like YouTube for partisan information. And people aren't just watching campaign ads, but seeking out primary sources like recorded speeches.
Young Democrats and Obama supporters reportedly lead the wave of political blogging and researching, with 74 percent of Internet-using Obama supporters logging on to follow the campaign, compared with Clinton's 57 percent and McCain's 56 percent.
And young voters are using the Web in different ways than other generations. The study found that young voters are consuming more political online video than older adults, while creating their own political commentary with posts, e-mails, text messages, and social-networking sites. One-third of all 18- to 29-year-old adults used a social-networking site for political activities like adding candidates as their friends.
Despite the statistics on increasing Internet usage, the Pew study concluded 74 percent of users said they would be just as involved in the campaign without using the Internet, a result that was also highlighted in a Pew report this January.
A U.S. Senate panel has unanimously approved a bill that would encourage federal, state, and local police to use and create special software designed to nab child pornography swappers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote.
All told, the bill would allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years for a broad array of efforts aimed at tackling Internet crimes against children. It calls for hiring 250 new federal agents at the FBI, the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. Postal Service dedicated to child exploitation cases; for beefing up personnel, equipment, and educational programs designed to combat Internet crimes against children; and for creating new forensics laboratories if the attorney general deems it necessary to deal with a "backlog" of online child exploitation cases.
"We need to give law enforcement the funds and the tools to pull the plug on Internet predators," Biden said in a statement.
An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an "open question." Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted.
It's unclear whether the changes are necessary. The Justice Department in the past, for instance, has netted guilty pleas in cases related to live Webcam recordings involving minors engaged in sexual acts.
The bill's passage follows a hearing last month at which Biden and other senators suggested they saw considerable promise in software designed to detect child pornography sources--specifically a tool called "Operation Fairplay." The so-called "comprehensive computer infrastructure" was developed two years ago by Special Agent Flint Waters in the Wyoming Attorney General's Office, where the system is still housed, and is currently being used by online child exploitation investigators nationwide.
The bill approved Thursday allocates $2 million for the attorney general to build upon that software by creating a "National Internet Crimes Against Children Data System," which would make information about ongoing cases--particularly high-priority ones--accessible to investigators nationwide and coordinate development of new software tools designed to detect alleged child predators in real time.
Through the existing Fairplay system, investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. The Fairplay software allows the investigator to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.
Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. It's not clear whether any wiretaps are also conducted to monitor ongoing file-swapping.
Through that process, investigators have identified more than 600,000 unique computers allegedly trafficking in child pornography and traced them to the United States. But Biden and others have voiced dismay that they're only equipped with the resources to investigate about 2 percent of those potential cases.
As part of the Bush administration's post-Clinton cleaning house efforts, the White House replaced its Lotus Notes e-mail system with Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange. Compatibility issues broke the automated archiving system and e-mails were lost.
No problem, Bush and Co. said and decided to have employees save files by hand. That's despite the fact that doing it manually is not a reliable or even tamper-proof way of dealing with important government communications that are required by law to be carefully archived.
Subsequent efforts to retrofit the old Lotus Notes-based archiving system to work with the new system failed or were aborted and Steven McDevitt, a senior official in the White House IT shop, resigned in disgust.
The situation led to two lawsuits filed by public interest groups against the White House and a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year. Last week, a federal judge ordered the government to fully answer questions related to the matter.
Maybe they should have stuck with Lotus Notes after all....
WASHINGTON--A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.
At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.
The software, dubbed "Operation Fairplay," was developed two years ago by Special Agent Flint Waters in the Wyoming Attorney General's Office, who, by Biden's description, is considered an expert in the field. The application is currently being used by all of the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces nationwide and internationally, Waters told the panel.
Waters describes the system as a "comprehensive computer infrastructure," housed in Wyoming, that grants law enforcement officers a "big picture" of what sort of child pornography file transfers are going on across the country. It's able to help investigators conduct undercover operations involving peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, chat rooms, Web sites, and mobile telephones, Waters said.
No one's trying to demonize those technologies, Waters said. "Blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs," he said.
But in 2008 alone, investigators using Fairplay have "seen" more than 1,400 IP addresses tied to swapping child pornography files on at least 100 different occasions, Waters said. He didn't say how he identified what he viewed as child pornography, which can include photographs of fully-clothed teenagers taken with their parents' consent. In addition, as critiques of a 1995 law review article pointed out, trying to guess the contents of a file based on its name can be a problematic process.
Based on Waters' statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. They're able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.
Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. "It's not necessarily the suspect but it tells us the physical location to start," Waters said. (He didn't say whether any wiretaps were conducted to monitor ongoing file swapping.)
Investigators use the IP addresses to keep track of offenders on a "daily" basis, Waters told CNET News.com during a break at the hearing. But in about half its cases, for purposes of longer-term tracking, the software captures "unique serial numbers" from the person's computer and keeps a tally of how many allegedly illicit files that particular user is trading.
Waters provided the committee with a chart that said, for example, law enforcement had "seen" one user in Pennsylvania exchanging those files 2,792 times, one New Jersey user swapping them 1,182 times, and so on. It wasn't clear whether the so-called serial number corresponded to IP address, P2P username, or something else, and Waters wouldn't elaborate.
"It's unique to the computer, that's as far as I'll go," Waters added, saying he didn't want to divulge more details that suspects could use to circumvent detection. "We're able to get it when they're transferring child pornography."
So far, investigators have recorded more than 642,000 "unique serial numbers" that can be traced to the United States and another 650,000 of them that cannot be traced to a particular country, with the number of unique serial numbers rising steadily each month since "widespread capturing" of the details began in October 2005.
In addition to tracking the senders of the files, investigators use Fairplay to track the files themselves through their hash values or digital signatures. In one case, investigators found that an image of a toddler who'd been "horribly abused" was available in more than 1 million places around the world, Waters said.
Lt. Robert Moses, unit commander of the Delaware State Police High Technology Crimes Unit, told the committee that the software has been instrumental in allowing law enforcement to "proactively" identify criminals who possess and distribute child pornography, helping lead to arrests and prosecutions.
Grier Weeks, executive director of an anticrime nonprofit association known as the National Association to Protect Children, said the system has "revolutionized law enforcement" in the child pornography area.
Biden and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the committee's ranking member, said they were troubled that because of limited resources, investigators are able to take on less than 2 percent of what they called "known" cases of child-pornography trafficking via the Internet. Biden said he also isn't pleased to see that the FBI currently has only 32 agents working in its "Innocent Images" unit, which focuses on child pornography. Still, Biden said he isn't out to "exaggerate" the problem and acknowledged that some of those cases may involve "accidental" exchanges of illicit material.
Biden pushed for passage of a bill known as the Combating Child Exploitation Act. It would authorize more than $1 billion over the next eight years to hire 250 new federal agents devoted to Internet crimes against children, provide additional funding to regional computer forensics labs, and give out more federal grants to the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces. The House of Representatives passed a companion bill in October.
"We can get our arms around it, the worst aspect of it," he said, "if we provide the resources."
Sessions cautioned the law enforcement officials to be smart about obtaining search warrants in such investigations. "You can't just go peruse everybody's computer," he said. "You train the officers in what is legal and established and approved and how to get warrants when they need a warrant?"
Waters said he "didn't know of any cases where (requests for warrants) had been overturned."
News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report
It wasn't immediately clear from Thursday's reports, but Google will indeed share information from its Orkut social-networking site with Brazilian authorities trying to deal with suspected pedophiles.
On Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate ordered Google to share information on 3,261 suspected pedophiles, information Google had refused to share earlier. No more.
"Google Brazil is legally obligated to comply with this order, and it is Google's policy to comply with valid judicial process," spokeswoman Sara Jew-lim said in a statement Friday.
Google already had tools in place to allow users to flag potentially illegal content, and it's now adding a filter "with the goal of blocking pornographic pictures when someone tries to upload them, so that these pictures will not be posted," she said.
A panel of the Brazilian senate has ordered Google to provide access to account information for 3,261 suspected pedophiles who've used Google's Orkut social-networking service, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday.
Under the order, a Senate committee investigating pedophilia would receive Google information identifying Orkut users who publish criminal material--information the search giant has refused to give to the Brazilian government, according to AFP.
In addition, the chief of Google's Brazilian operations, Alexandre Hohagen, told the panel Google will take measures to stop child pornography and hate crimes on Orkut, The Associated Press reported.
In August, Google had banned users who allegedly had spread child pornography and hate speech regarding blacks, homosexuals, and Jews, but had refused to share the users' identities with Brazil, citing U.S. privacy laws, the AP said.
Nobody's surprised that the same old legal and moral issues about sex have made their way to the Internet, but dealing with them has been tough. For example, MySpace.com grappled for months with sex offender issues, and in January unveiled a plan to make its site safer for teens.
Following a recent trend of politicians embroiled in text message-related sex scandals, Finland's foreign minister is facing calls for his resignation Saturday after a tabloid published a suggestive text message he had sent to an erotic dancer, Reuters is reporting.
Ilkka Kanerva sent about 200 text messages to the 29-year-old dancer and at first said they were related to her performing at his 60th birthday party, Reuters says. But on Friday he admitted the messages weren't appropriate.
A Finnish paper quoted him as saying, "I would not present them in Sunday school, but they are not totally out of line either," according to Reuters.
Kanerva is saying he won't resign. His longstanding partner "has accepted his apology over the matter," according to Reuters.
The story sounds all too familiar, what with Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick facing charges in a text message scandal that threatens to send him to prison, and salacious text messages playing a role in the fall of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
Our role is to highlight the technological trend--not to pass judgment--but that's hard given all we know about how easily phone records can become public records, especially in the case of officials.
Stanford law professor Larry Lessig speaks at the National Press Club in Washington about the launch of his grassroots "Change Congress" campaign.
(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)WASHINGTON--Iconic Internet law professor Larry Lessig may have cast off plans for a congressional bid of his own, but he still wants to turn the political process as we know it upside down.
No more money from corporate political action committees and lobbyists. No more earmarks to fund pet projects in federal spending bills. Public financing for all congressional campaigns. And throughout it all, transparency.
Those are the four pillars of Lessig's "Change Congress" movement, which he unveiled, along with a beta Web site, which he describes as a "mash-up applied to politics," at an event here Thursday afternoon. For the project, he has teamed up with Joe Trippi, best known as the national campaign manager for Democrat Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and its pioneering use of online organizing.
None of his ideas, of course, are particularly new, which Lessig himself readily acknowledged. A number of organizations--including Ralph Nader's Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation, which sponsored his talk on Thursday--dedicate themselves exclusively to promoting government transparency. Projects like Open Secrets offer more readily searchable databases of political campaign contributions, while groups like Citizens Against Government Waste have made it a mission to expose congressional pork-barrel spending.
And even some politicians are already displaying interest in those topics. A number of congressional Republicans have been rallying for an earmark freeze. On the Democratic side, Senators Barack Obama (and, when he was in the race, former Sen. John Edwards) pledged not to accept presidential campaign contributions from registered lobbyists and PACs.
Lessig, who briefly flirted with running this year for the Silicon Valley seat vacated by the late Rep. Tom Lantos, said he's not trying to compete with existing efforts but to "complement" them.
"My claim here is not some simple claim against money or the importance of money," Lessig said, as he paged through slides containing key words ("dependence") and an occasional image (dollar bills, the U.S. Capitol). "We just need to recognize that money in certain places is destructive of trust."
It's not "personal corruption" he's after, either, as he said he considers the current Democratic Congress to be one of the least corrupt in history. Rather, it's an "institutional" corruption, which he said is exemplified, to name a few examples, by the sugar lobby's alleged influence on government nutritional guidelines, the pharmaceutical lobby's influence on federal drug approvals, and the energy lobby's influence on global warming policy. Key policy errors are being made because of this "economy of influence" and "improper dependence on money," Lessig charged.
"It's not a dependence that reveals itself in the way evil people act, but a dependence that corrupts even the way good people solve the problems they come to Washington to address," he said. "We need to solve this problem now."
Lessig even hit out at unnamed law-professor colleagues for "accepting money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to write these expert reports," saying he eschews discussing public policy matters "related to anyone who has ever compensated me." He recounted feeling more than a little resentment when, in an e-mail exchange with Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), the senator implied that Lessig's support for Net neutrality regulations stemmed from monetary nudging from the likes of Google, which was not the case.
The first "layer" of the Change Congress project is now live at its Web site. It allows politicians and citizens alike to sign up in support of one or more or the movement's four tenets and nab an icon and code to broadcast their support on their Web sites. The approach is modeled after Lessig's own Creative Commons licensing arrangement, in which content creators are free to customize the extent to which others can share and remix their works.
The site also houses a "sludge-colored" map on which users can click congressional districts and learn how much of an elected politico's political donations come from PACs.
In a second phase, Lessig plans to use Wikipedia-style tools to attract collaborators who work on discerning where various candidates and members of Congress stand on the movement's four principles. Those citizens will also ask the politicians to pledge their support formally, and they'll use that information to plot out, district by district, who's in and who's out. Lessig said he's going after the Wikipedia model of amassing information, mobilizing lots of people to share the research and advocacy in a "manageable, digestible, segmentable" way.
During the final phase, people will be asked to pledge money to candidates who have supported the Change Congress movement's priorities.
Lessig likened his vision to what an alcoholic's struggle for recovery. Sure, that person has to worry about resolving problems with his family, or his job, or his liver, but before he can face those things, he has to confront the alcoholism itself.
The way Lessig sees it, the nation's most important problems--global warming, education, and the Iraq war, to name a few--can't be remedied until "we solve this first problem, this dependence on money."
