October 2013

Restoring Free Political Speech

[Commentary] The Supreme Court re-opens for business this week, and one of its first cases is a splendid opportunity to restore the First Amendment as a bulwark of free political speech.

The result in McCutcheon v. FEC will likely hang on whether Chief Justice John Roberts has the courage of his constitutional convictions and is willing to overturn the misbegotten logic of Buckley v. Valeo (1976). In Buckley, the Justices allowed Congress to limit contributions based on the fear of corruption or the appearance of corruption. In the case of contributions to a single candidate, there is at least in theory the risk of a political quid pro quo, though that fear turns out to have been exaggerated. There is little such risk of quid-pro-quo corruption if a donor spreads his donations among dozens of candidates.

Samsung Seeks US Veto of Import Ban Just Like Apple Got

Samsung Electronics wants the same favor from President Barack Obama that he gave Apple -- the right to keep importing smartphones and tablets found to infringe the other’s patents.

Unless the White House overturns an import ban against Samsung for infringing two Apple patents, the world’s biggest maker of smartphones will see certain older models locked out of the US at midnight Oct. 8 Washington time. The Administration’s been in this position before. On Aug. 3, it overturned an import ban won by Samsung against older versions of Apple’s iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G. The two companies are the biggest players in the $279.9 billion global smartphone market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung says blocking one competitor’s products while letting another’s remain on the U.S. market could be seen as pro-American bias.

Europe Aims to Regulate the Cloud

Even before revelations this summer by Edward J. Snowden on the extent of spying by the National Security Agency on electronic communications, the European Parliament busied itself attaching amendments to its data privacy regulation. Several would change the rules of cloud computing, the technology that enables the sharing of software and files among computers on the Internet. And since the news broke of widespread monitoring by the United States spy agency, cloud computing has become one of the regulatory flash points in Brussels as a debate ensued over how to protect data from snooping American eyes. The European Union wants to regulate the cloud even if that makes its use more complicated.

Europe's Phone Firms Face Profit Hurdles With 4G

After years of lagging behind the US and Asia, European telecommunications companies are starting to close the spending gap on so-called fourth-generation telecom networks, which help speed up such data-heavy tasks as Web browsing and video streaming on smartphones and tablets. But with intense competition continuing to push down European phone bills, telecom executives say the big question remains whether all the new investment will pay off.

Kroes stands firm in roam charges fight

Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s telecoms commissioner, is set for a battle with Europe’s former monopolist operators, as she vows to stand by her far-reaching reforms, including cutting mobile roaming fees for consumers.

She said roaming charges were outrageous and that mobile operators had to seek new business models to survive. “Telecom companies need to start thinking in an innovative way, outside the box,” Kroes said. “The days of roaming are over, they need to accept that we live in a new digital era.” Kroes will tell the industry that the investor community, including large banks in the City of London, had backed her single telecom market legislation, which aims to boost investment and economic growth by knocking down national barriers across the 28 country bloc.

UK mobile operators included in government broadband plans

Britain’s leading telecoms groups will be asked by the government to provide greater competition and innovation to the next phase of the coalition’s much criticized rural broadband rollout.

At a meeting convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on Oct 7, the UK mobile operators will be invited for the first time with fixed broadband providers to become involved in plans to stretch superfast broadband across almost all parts of the country by 2018. The government has set aside £250m to provide coverage to areas not supplied by its existing program, BDUK. The project, which aims to cover 90 per cent of the country by 2015, has come under fierce criticism by the government spending watchdog for a flawed and costly process that meant £530m of subsidies were likely to be won only by BT, the national telecoms incumbent.

NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity. But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request. Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity."

Clapper defends NSA's attempts to crack Tor network

The US intelligence community works to crack anonymous online communication tools because the country’s adversaries use those tools, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said.

News reports about the NSA’s attempts to infiltrate Tor “fail to make clear that the Intelligence Community’s interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies,” he wrote. “In the modern telecommunications era, our adversaries have the ability to hide their messages and discussions among those of innocent people around the world. They use the very same social networking sites, encryption tools and other security features that protect our daily online activities.”

Why the NSA's attacks on the Internet must be made public

[Commentary] The National Security Agency's actions are making us all less safe, because its eavesdropping mission is degrading its ability to protect the US. Among IT security professionals, it has been long understood that the public disclosure of vulnerabilities is the only consistent way to improve security. That's why researchers publish information about vulnerabilities in computer software and operating systems, cryptographic algorithms, and consumer products like implantable medical devices, cars, and CCTV cameras.

Without public disclosure, you'd be much less secure against cybercriminals, hacktivists, and state-sponsored cyberattackers. The NSA has two conflicting missions. Its eavesdropping mission has been getting all the headlines, but it also has a mission to protect US military and critical infrastructure communications from foreign attack. But with the rise of mass-market computing and the Internet, the two missions have become interwoven. It becomes increasingly difficult to attack their systems and defend our systems, because everything is using the same systems: Microsoft Windows, Cisco routers, HTML, TCP/IP, iPhones, Intel chips, and so on. Finding a vulnerability – or creating one – and keeping it secret to attack the bad guys necessarily leaves the good guys more vulnerable.

Why everyone is left less secure when the NSA doesn’t help fix security flaws

In a frank discussion about the government's approach to vulnerabilities in cyber-infrastructure, former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden said the agency is not always "ethically or legally compelled" to help fix flaws it knows about. If the agency thinks that no one else will be able to exploit vulnerability, it leaves the problem unfixed to aid in its own spying efforts. That approach might be convenient for the NSA, but it needlessly endangers the security of Americans' computers.

Benton

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