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Archive for February 25th, 2010

Does Italy’s Google Conviction Portend More Censorship? | Threat Level | Wired.com: “Does Italy’s Google Conviction Portend More Censorship?

By Ryan Singel, February 24, 2010

googleitaliaOnline rights activists are divided Wednesday over an Italian court’s guilty verdicts against Google executives who were convicted on privacy charges for not blocking a video that made fun of a child with Down syndrome. All agree the controversial ruling runs counter to longstanding U.S. and E.U. ‘safe harbor’ laws immunizing online service providers for what users do — but the activists are mixed over what the decision means and how much importance should be place on it.

Leslie Harris, the president of the influential Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the ruling would be used by authoritarian regimes to justify their own web censorship.

‘Today’s stunning verdict sets an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens free expression and chills innovation on the global internet,’ Harris said in an e-mail statement. ‘If the conviction is allowed to stand, it will chill the provision of Web 2.0 services that provide user-generated content platforms in Italy, and Italian internet users will find themselves without a powerful forum for free expression.

‘Most troubling, what happened in Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy. The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used to justify their own efforts to suppress internet freedom.’

Chief among the concerns is that nations might turn to using criminal laws or threats of criminal prosecutions to force companies to bend to the their political will.

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation shares Harris’ concern for online rights.

‘The threat to internet free speech from nations around the world that don’t have the same laws and attitudes about free speech is absolutely a constant problem and is getting worse,’ Tien said.

But he warned against placing too much emphasis on this case, which many see as thinly veiled machinations against Google by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has nearly monopoly control over Italy’s mainstream media. Italy’s parliament is currently considering a law that would put online video services under the same rules imposed on broadcast stations — legislation intended to stifle online speech.

But the Google case will drag on in appeals for years and it’s not clear it will be anything more than a legal anomaly.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of real and sticky issues around hate speech and pornography — where people have legitimate issues and real public policy has to be worked out, according to Tien.

‘I’d prefer people to think about those cases and not focus on show cases,’ he said.

Google, for one, called the decision ‘astonishing.’

‘It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built,’ Google lawyer Matt Sucherman wrote on Google’s blog. ‘If that ’safe harbor’ principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.’

And while it might be tempting for some to dismiss the suit as the work of a crazy Italian justice system, the United States is no stranger to politically motivated legal attacks on free speech and internet freedom.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles prosecuted and convicted a Missouri woman on hacking charges for helping put up a fake MySpace profile to harass a neighbor’s teenage daughter, who later committed suicide. The judge in the case overturned Lori Drew’s conviction. He found the government’s contention that violating a website’s terms of service was the same as hacking ‘unconstitutional.’

And in South Carolina, the Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened to criminally prosecute Craigslist management if the classified listings site didn’t remove its erotic listings category, saying the site was promoting prostitution. A federal judge had to order McMaster to stop his threats.

The Italy decision won’t be published in full for several weeks and will likely be on appeal for years. None of those convicted will likely ever serve their six months of jail time, in no small part since they all live outside of Italy. The video at issue appeared in 2006, on Google Video, a service now replaced by YouTube.

University of Virgina media studies and law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, meanwhile, sees the Italian case as a very local issue rooted in Italian politics and a sign that Google’s culture of audacious enterprises isn’t as welcome outside the Unite States as it hoped it would be.

‘The government in Italy wants to hold Google down in Italy until it says ‘uncle’ for a while,’ Vaidhyanathan said. ‘But it does say a lot about the fact that the globalization of Google is not going well. The ruling comes as cyberliberties are in flux globally and Google is trying to maintain revenues in countries like Egypt and Russia.’

Vaidhyanathan, whose upcoming book The Googlization of Everything tackles the subject of Google as a worldwide cultural force, says that the net’s and Google’s method of doing things first and letting people opt out later is proving to be not a hit everywhere around the globe.

‘Google is finding that getting beyond America is difficult,’ sad Vaidhyanathan, referring to Google’s hacking showdown in China, privacy issues with its Street View mapping cameras in Germany, and the censorship demands placed on it by China, Turkey, Thailand, Argentina and India.

‘I can see the general objection to Google’s way of doing things,’ said Vaidhyanathan. ‘It’s default setting is that it can do whatever it wants and if you have a problem, just let them know, and that opt-out model is not applicable in every case.’

To others, like Tien, the ruling is simply baffling. Clearly, Italy doesn’t want its own service providers to have to meet the burden of approving every forum posting, blog comment or uploaded video — and punishing executives when their companies miss the mark — as was the case of the Google executives in Italy.

That’s akin to making automobile executives personally liable in any automobile accident related to the company’s sticky pedal woes.

Tien said that would be a ‘massive extension of liability.’

Leading article: Not the way to police the web’s Wild West – Leading Articles, Opinion – The Independent: “Leading article: Not the way to police the web’s Wild West

Thursday, 25 February 2010

In some ways, the internet has been like another Pandora’s Box which has unleashed new furies on the world, from online child pornography rings to cyber bullying. The case of four students in Italy who filmed themselves victimising an autistic child and posted their taunts online is the latest example of the ways in which the web facilitates cruelty.

Human vindictiveness and depravity are nothing new, of course. The difference is that now this kind of vile behaviour can be shared among millions with a video phone, an internet connection and a few mouse clicks.

The question is: how should the authorities respond? An Italian court has come up with one answer by imposing a suspended jail sentence on three Google executives, on to whose site the clip was uploaded. Alas, this is unlikely to be a practical solution.

One might sympathise with the judgment of Judge Oscar Magi. By holding the most powerful player in the internet to account in this fashion, the court has sent an electrifying message to all websites that they need to be careful about what they allow to be posted; that grossly cruel or nakedly defamatory material will not be tolerated.

But if website hosts are going to be held legally responsible for everything that goes up online, the danger is that they will begin censoring text, images, videos, indeed every kind of contribution from the public, on the precautionary principle. That would be a deeply regressive curb on the freedom of the web.

Those who argue that the internet will always be like the Wild West, with no standards of conduct or decency, are being too pessimistic. Powerful web hosts can – and should – do more to make their sites civilised spaces. But threatening the employees of such organisations with jail is no way to advance this cause.

Google guilty of privacy crime in web test case – Europe, World – The Independent: “Google guilty of privacy crime in web test case

Three executives convicted in Italy after school bullying video was uploaded

By Michael Day in milan and Robert Verkaik

Thursday, 25 February 2010

Three Google executives were convicted yesterday in a landmark privacy case that critics said could severely curtail internet freedom.

In what privacy experts described as a ‘chilling ruling’, a judge in Milan imposed suspended prison sentences on the men who he said were criminally liable for allowing the posting of a clip on Google’s video service which featured the bullying of an autistic child.

Google’s senior vice-president and chief legal officer, David Drummond, the former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes and global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, were all found guilty of violating the boy’s privacy. The senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted. Legal experts said the case had worrying implications for all internet service providers and other hosting platforms which do not create their own content such as YouTube and Facebook.

During the trial the prosecutors accused Google of negligence, saying the video remained online for two months, even though web users had already posted comments asking for it to be removed. But Google argued that it had complied with the law by taking it down when contacted by the Italian authorities and assisted prosecutors in bringing those responsible to court.

In recent months the censorship of Italian websites has become a controversial issue following a spate of hate sites against officials, including the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

But some experts fear that the case could have much broader implications. Last night Richard Thomas, the former Information Commissioner and consultant to the privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, told The Independent that the case was of grave concern to both internet users and service providers.

‘Whether it is a one-off case or precedent-setting ruling, it will send reverberations around the whole world,’ he said. ‘This ruling is simply inconsistent with the way the internet works. There is no UK data law or European law that I know which could lead to this result, where employees of a company are sentenced to suspended jail sentences for being personally criminally liable for the uploading of a video clip in this way.’

Andy Millmore, head of litigation at the media and entertainment law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said: ‘This ruling has major implications for internet service providers, potentially making them automatically liable for the first time for what others post on sites they own. If upheld, it will make it theoretically possible to pursue sites for hosting content which has not been posted with the express permission of the people featured.’

The case arose in late 2006 when students at a school in Turin filmed and then uploaded a video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The complaint was brought by the boy’s father with an Italian advocacy group for people with Down’s syndrome, Vivi Down, although the boy had autism, not Down’s.

The Italian public prosecutor greeted the verdict as a victory for individuals over corporations. ‘A company’s rights cannot prevail over a person’s dignity. This sentence sends a clear signal,’ the lawyer Alfredo Robledo said outside the Milan courthouse.

Last night Google said it hoped to overturn the verdicts on appeal, while the convicted executives issued their own statements. Mr Drummond said that the verdict set a ‘dangerous precedent’.

The complaints of the Google executives are likely to fall on deaf ears in Italy, however. Sympathy for the victim was already running high this week following the emergence of an Italian group on Facebook calling for children with Down’s syndrome be used for ‘target practice’.

The Equal Opportunities minister, Mara Carfagna, said: ‘Italy will not tolerate incidents of discrimination of any sort, let alone against the disabled,’ and added: ‘Those responsible for creating this idiocy will be prosecuted.’ Facebook operators in the US shut the group down soon after.

The model: How it makes $23.6bn

* An analyst once described Google as an advertising business which has a good line in search results. Revenues hit $23.6bn in 2009, with 97 per cent coming from advertising. Every time there is a search on its site, an almost instantaneous auction is carried out, with an advertiser paying from a few cents to tens of dollars. Google’s algorithms then place the adverts on its site.

* Most of this is done through AdWords, Google’s ad system, which allows any company to create adverts at a low cost and make sure those adverts are tied to certain keywords. When those words are typed in, the company’s advert will run next to the search results.

* The rest of Google’s advertising revenues come from AdSense, which sells adverts on third-party sites. Of the 3 per cent of revenues not generated from ads, most come from providing branded email systems and other corporate tools to companies.

CyberLaw is also publishing a PDF copy of the Microsoft surveillance compliance document which is mentioned in the story below as the public has a right to know about Microsoft’s policy.

Visit and support http://cryptome.org/

Microsoft Takes Down Whistleblower Site, Read the Secret Doc Here | Threat Level | Wired.com

By Ryan Singel Email Author, February 24, 2010

designedfor_emma_swannMicrosoft has managed to do what a roomful of secretive, three-letter government agencies have wanted to do for years: get the whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome shut down.

Microsoft dropped a DMCA notice alleging copyright infringement on Cryptome’s proprietor John Young on Tuesday after he posted a Microsoft surveillance compliance document that the company gives to law enforcement agents seeking information on Microsoft users. Young filed a counterclaim on Wednesday — arguing he had a fair use to publishing the document, a full day before the Thursday deadline set by his hosting provider, Network Solutions.

Regardless, Cryptome was shut down by Network Solutions and its domain name locked on Wednesday — shuttering a site that thumbed its nose at the government since 1996 — posting thousands of documents that the feds would prefer never saw the light of day.

Microsoft did not return a call for comment by press time.

The 22-page document (.pdf) contains no trade secrets, but will tell Microsoft users things they didn’t know. (You can read it directly on your own computer from the above link, or read it inline below.)

For instance, Xbox Live records every IP address you ever use to login and stores them for perpetuity. While that’s going to be creepy for some, there’s an upside if your house gets robbed, according to the document: ‘If your investigation involves a stolen Xbox console, if the console serial number or Xbox LIVE user gamertag is provided and the console has been connected to the Internet, IP connection records may be available.’

The Microsoft® Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook (.pdf) also goes so far as to provide sample language for subpoenas and diagrams on how to understand server logs.

Other things you might not know and which Microsoft (sometimes oddly) doesn’t want you to know?

Microsoft retains only the last 10 login records for Windows Live ID. As for your instant messages, it tells police that it keeps no record of what anyone says over Microsoft Messenger – though it will turn over who is on your buddy list.

And if you like to use Microsoft’s social networking products — like its old-school Group mailing list or its Facebook-like Spaces product, be aware that it’s very social when it comes to law enforcement or court subpoenas.

As Microsoft tells potential subpoenaees, ‘when you are looking for information on a specific incident like a photo posting or message posting, please request all group content and logs. We cannot retrieve single incident data.’ The same holds for Spaces — if you are interested in a single picture, just request the entire thing. Call it Subpoena 2.0.

The compliance handbook is just the latest in a series of leaks of similar documents from other companies. Yahoo, like Microsoft, reacted as if its secret sauce had somehow been spilled by letting curious users know the hows and whys of how the companies deal with lawful surveillance requests. Google, for all its crusading for internet freedom, refuses to say how often law enforcement comes searching for user data.

The one company who has had a stand-up policy for years is the Cox Communications’ ISP, which has had this information and their price list public for years.

But hypocrisy is the name of the game for giant internet companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google that want us to entrust large portions of our lives to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Buzz, Xbox, Hotmail, Messenger, Google Groups. When it comes to the most basic information about how, why and how often our data is subpoenaed and collected without our knowledge, these online innovators resort to lawyers, abusive legal process and double-talk.

Italy’s harmful conviction of Google – Los Angeles Times: “Editorial

February 24, 2010

In September 2006, four students at a school in Turin, Italy, beat and humiliated an autistic classmate. A fifth student captured the incident on her cellphone camera, then posted the digital footage to Google Video. It spent two months as one of the site’s most popular clips before Google took it down at the request of Italian police.

The attackers were convicted and ordered to perform 10 months of community service; the girl who recorded the beating was convicted too, and given a similar penalty. But that wasn’t enough for Italian authorities. On Wednesday, a court in Milan convicted three Google executives of violating the victim’s privacy and sentenced them to six months in jail. Judge Oscar Magi suspended the sentence and imposed no financial penalty, so the conviction has little practical effect on the three executives. The implications for the Internet, however, are enormous and chilling.

One reason the Internet is so transformative is that companies such as Google have built platforms that anyone can use to distribute works and products. They radically lower the barriers to entry into the markets for information and entertainment, promoting both speech and commerce. That’s in sharp contrast to traditional media companies, which typically exist to publish or broadcast just the works in the portfolios they control. But because some of the new online platforms don’t screen material before it’s exposed to the public, bad things inevitably happen.

The choice, though, is between a system that pushes online companies to respond quickly and fairly to complaints about videos after they’re posted, and one that compels them to become gatekeepers. Lawmakers in the U.S. and the European Union have opted, correctly, for the former approach. But there has been growing pressure from a variety of aggrieved parties — companies and individuals claiming to have been defamed or bullied, entertainment conglomerates and luxury brands fighting piracy — to force the Googles of the world to police their sites and block disputed material before it draws a complaint, or even before it’s posted. Magi’s ruling, unfortunately, is a victory for that side. It could prevent start-ups with open platforms from competing with the likes of Google (and Facebook and EBay) while forcing the incumbents to reduce the flow of material onto their sites.

By convicting Google executives for violating privacy with a video they did not make or post online, Magi undermined the message that prosecutors sent to the youths who did. The right lesson should have been that the Internet gives people great power, and those who misuse it will bear the responsibility — all of it.

AFP: Outrage in Italy over anti-Down Syndrome website

(AFP) –22 February, 2010

ROME — Politicians and Internet activists in Italy have denounced a page on the social networking site Facebook that calls for children with Down Syndrome to be used for target practice.

Police were trying to track down who set up the page, which features a photo of a Down Syndrome baby with the word ‘idiot’ superimposed on it, and by late Sunday had attracted nearly 1,700 members.

The page proposed what it said was ‘an easy and amusing solution’ to get rid of ‘these foul creatures’: use them as targets at shooting centres.

Equality minister Mara Carfagna, promising legal action against those responsible for the page, denouncing it as ‘unacceptable and dangerous.’

A number of rival groups have already been set up on Facebook to denounce the original page, one of which had attracted more than 17,000 members.

‘People’s ignorance has no limits,’ Manuela Colombo, the president of a support group for families with Down Syndrome children told ANSA news agency.

Police action to get the site shut down might take some time according to some experts, because Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California, and the procedure might entail a lengthy legal process.

One baby in 1,200 is born with Down Sydrome in Italy and there are 38,000 with the condition living there, 61 percent of whom are older than 25 years, according to figures cited by the Italian Down Syndrome Association, ANSA reported.

Italy Convicts Google Execs for Down Syndrome Video

By Reuters, February 24, 2010

MILAN (Reuters) — A Milan court convicted three Google executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

Google will appeal the six-month suspended jail terms and said the verdict ‘poses a crucial question for the freedom on which the internet is built,’ since none of the three employees found guilty had anything to do with the offending video.

‘They didn’t upload it, they didn’t film it, they didn’t review it and yet they have been found guilty,’ said Google’s senior communications manager, Bill Echikson, in Milan.

The court convicted senior vice-president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted.

The executives, none of whom are based in Italy, do not face actual imprisonment as the sentences were suspended, while an appeals process in Italy can take many years.
The guilty verdict ‘poses a crucial question for the freedom on which the internet is built,’ Google asserts.

They were not in Italy for the hearing. Drummond is based in California, Fleischer in Paris and Desikan in London, while De Los Reyes has since retired, Echikson told Reuters.

The complaint was brought by an Italian advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, Vivi Down, and the boy’s father, after four classmates at a Turin school uploaded a clip to Google Video showing them bullying the boy.

‘A company’s rights cannot prevail over a person’s dignity. This sentence sends a clear signal,’ public prosecutor Alfredo Robledo told reporters outside the Milan courthouse.

Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause of mental retardation, occurring in about 1 out of 700 live births.

The video was filmed with a mobile phone and posted on the site in September 2006.

‘Threat To Net Freedom’

Google argued that it removed the video immediately after being notified and cooperated with Italian authorities to help identify the bullies and bring them to justice.

It says that, as hosting platforms that do not create their own content, Google Video, YouTube and Facebook cannot be held responsible for content that others upload.

Drummond said in a statement the verdict ‘sets a dangerous precedent’ and meant ‘every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability.’ He said the law was clear in Italy and the European Union that ‘hosting providers like Google are not required to monitor content that they host.’

Leslie Harris, the president of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology said the ruling was an ‘extremely dangerous precedent.’

‘This is precisely the sort of action by a Western democracy that undermines Secretary Clinton’s call for global internet freedom,’ Harris said. ‘The principle that technological intermediaries should be protected from liability for content posted by users has been a cornerstone of Internet freedom. It is enshrined in both E.U. and U.S. law.

‘Most troubling, what happened it Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy. The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used justify their own efforts to suppress internet freedom.’

Fleischer said if employees were ‘criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited.’

The prosecutors accused Google of negligence, saying the video remained online for two months even though some web users had already posted comments asking for it to be taken down.

Down syndrome support group Vivi Down said in a statement that it was ‘very satisfied’ with the guilty verdict.

Censoring of websites has become a hot issue in Italy in recent months, following a spate of hate sites against officials including Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The government briefly studied plans to black out internet hate sites after fan pages emerged praising an attack on the premier, but the idea was dropped after executives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft agreed to a shared code of conduct rather than legislation.

(By Manuela D’Alessandro. Additional reporting by Emilio Parodi and Eleanor Biles; writing by Stephen Brown in Rome; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton. Additional reporting by Ryan Singel.)