February 2013

Congress will soon make an historic decision over whether a military or civilian agency should head up intelligence-sharing efforts about cyber threats, argued Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, during a panel at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco.

"In democratic society, do you want the military to have this center of gravity kind of control over what could potentially be very, very large flows of information about private to private communications?” Dempsey asked. "You can talk about creating a lot of checks and balances, [but] one of the fundamental checks and balances is you put that authority on the civilian side." Dempsey's comments come as Congress is weighing a controversial cybersecurity bill that aims to remove the legal barriers that hinder government agencies and private companies from sharing information about malicious source code and other cyber threats with one another in real time. Reps. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, re-introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA, earlier this month.

Regular users of the Internet have been busy in the week since The New York Times reported that Mandiant, a computer security firm, had tied a prolific Chinese hacking group to a specific People’s Liberation Army unit in Shanghai. Chinese-speaking users and amateur hackers have scoured the Internet for traces of the online personas of those who Mandiant claims work on behalf of China’s P.L.A. Unit 61398.

The new evidence, while circumstantial, adds to the signs suggesting Chinese military efforts to hack into American corporate computer systems. Mandiant said that in one case, people were able to trace one of the P.L.A.’s hackers to an apartment building located 600 meters from the military unit’s headquarters. In another, they were able to trace one hacker back to the P.L.A.’s Information Engineering University, described by American computer security researchers as one of the Chinese military’s top training schools for computer hacking. They also found recruitment notices for Unit 61398, suggesting the group has been active since at least 2004, despite the fact that the unit’s headquarters were not built until later.

[Commentary] Exclusive rights conferred by intellectual property laws can conflict with human rights. Yet policy makers rarely acknowledge this possibility and continue to make IP rules that increase the scope of exclusive rights.

In a recent decision the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) disagreed, recognizing that copyright laws can have an adverse impact on the freedom of expression. Scholars point out that the court is likely to hear more such cases in future. The case in question is Ashby Donald and Others v. France. The case concerned three photographers who had taken photos at fashion shows in Paris and posted them on the Internet site, Viewfinder. It appears that under French law, the photographers required the fashion house’s permission to post these photos. Because that permission was not obtained, the French courts ruled that the posting amounted to copyright infringement. The photographers were ordered to pay fines totaling 250,000 euros. They appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) arguing that their conviction violated their free expression rights guaranteed under Article 10 of the European Convention.

Many lower-income patients say they would like to communicate electronically with their health care providers but are unable to do so because of insufficient technology at the clinics where they receive care, according to a new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. For the study, researchers from the University of California-San Francisco surveyed 416 patients at six San Francisco Department of Public Health community clinics that primarily serve uninsured or publically insured individuals.

The study found that:

• 78% of the study participants expressed interest in electronic communication with their health care providers;
• 60% said they use email;
• 54% said they obtain information from the Internet; and
• 17% said they already use email to communicate informally with their health care providers.

According
to the researchers, many safety-net clinics do not offer the patient portals or secure messaging systems necessary to support electronic communication with doctors.