Lassiter Tidwell

First, an important note: the federal government is not, in fact, proposing to save newspapers by reining in fair use, creating a national "hot news" right over facts, or charging Internet subscribers $5 a month.

But plenty of people are, and they have now resorted to seeking government support for some of the worst "save the media" ideas ever put to paper.

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Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voice mail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”

Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

Bradley Manning (Facebook.com)

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”

He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the U.S.

“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?,” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir. … He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”

Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.

The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’, erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm.”

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the U.S., had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.

She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.

The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”

Ex-hacker Adrian Lamo (Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com)

An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.

Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.

“I was in the military for 5 years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.

The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.

That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

The inclusion of the phrase "G Rabbit" in small, lettering in Applicant's mark is "not sufficient to create a commercial impression that is separate from opposer's famous mark." In short, the similarities "overcome" the dissimilarities between the marks.

And so the Board sustained the opposition.

TTABlog comment: Applicant didn't put up much of a fight. It did not file a brief, take testimony, or submit any evidence. Its officer failed to appear for a testimony deposition noticed by Opposer. Apparently Applicant saw the handwriting on the wall.

Should Opposer have filed for summary judgment? What do you think?

Text Copyright John L. Welch 2010.

Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.

Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.

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The US government needs 10,000 volunteers to hook a free, specialized router up to their broadband connections.

The FCC announced yesterday that 80 percent of Americans don't know the advertised speed of their own broadband connection—and that says nothing about the actual speed, which is often 40 or 50 percent slower. Broadband quality relies on more than sheer speed, but the public knows almost nothing about important, but more esoteric measurements like connection uptime, packet loss, latency, jitter, and DNS query time.

Neither does the FCC.

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The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA's abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA's more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.

So why have P2P lawsuits against individuals spiked dramatically in 2010? It's all thanks to the US Copyright Group, a set of lawyers who have turned P2P prosecution into revenue generation in order to "SAVE CINEMA." The model couldn't be simpler: find an indie filmmaker; convince the production company to let you sue individual "John Does" for no charge; send out subpoenas to reveal each Doe's identity; demand that each person pay $1,500 to $2,500 to make the lawsuit go away; set up a website to accept checks and credit cards; split the revenue with the filmmaker.

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WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as “The Onion Router,” a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion in 2006 that his organization had already “received over one million documents from 13 countries” before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.

Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on WikiLeaks, but the new report is the first indication that some of the data and documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the documents to be seen or posted. It also explains an enduring mystery of WikiLeaks’ launch: how the organization was able to amass a collection of secret documents before its website was open for business.

Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. In its search for government and corporate secrets traveling through the Tor network, it’s conceivable that WikiLeaks may have also vacuumed up sensitive information from human rights workers who did not want their data seen by outsiders.

The interception may have legal implications, depending on what country the activist was based in. In the United States, the surreptitious interception of electronic communication is generally a violation of federal law, but the statute includes a broad exception for service providers who monitor their own networks for legitimate maintenance or security reasons. “The statutory language is broad enough that it might cover this and provide a defense,” says former U.S. federal prosecutor Mark Rasch.

The New Yorker article did not indicate whether WikiLeaks continues to intercept data from the Tor network. Assange did not immediately return a call for comment from Threat Level.

WikiLeaks uses a modified version of the Tor network for its own operations, moving document submissions through it to keep them private. WikiLeaks computers also reportedly feed “hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents,” according to The New Yorker.

The intercepted data was gathered from Tor sometime before or around December 2006, when Assange and fellow activists needed a substantial number of documents in their repository in order to be taken seriously as a viable tool for whistleblowers and others.

The solution came from one of the activists associated with the organization who owned and operated a server that was being used in the Tor anonymizing network. Tor works by using servers donated by volunteers around the world to bounce traffic around, en route to its destination. Traffic is encrypted through most of that route, and routed over a random path each time a person uses it.

Under Tor’s architecture, administrators at the entry point can identify the user’s IP address, but can’t read the content of the user’s correspondence or know its final destination. Each node in the network thereafter only knows the node from which it received the traffic, and it peels off a layer of encryption to reveal the next node to which it must forward the connection.

By necessity, however, the last node through which traffic passes has to decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination. Someone operating that exit node can therefore read the traffic passing through this server.

According to The New Yorker, “millions of secret transmissions passed through” the node the WikiLeaks activist operated — believed to be an exit node. The data included sensitive information of foreign governments.

The activist believed the data was being siphoned from computers around the world by hackers who appeared to be in China and who were using the Tor network to transmit the stolen data. The activist began recording the data as it passed through his node, and this became the basis for the trove of data WikiLeaks said it had “received.”

The first document WikiLeaks posted at its launch was a “secret decision” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. The document, which called for hiring hit men to execute government officials, had been siphoned from the Tor network.

Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about Wikileaks quickly superseded the leak itself.

Since then, the site has published numerous sensitive documents related to the U.S. military, foreign governments and corporations. WikiLeaks made headlines in April when it published a classified U.S. Army video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in an Iraqi neighborhood. The raid killed at least 18 people — including two Reuters employees — and injured two children.

WikiLeaks, whose website is hosted primarily through a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, never reveals the sources of its documents, and in the case of the Apache video, Assange has said only that it came from someone who was angry about the military’s frequent use of the term “collateral damage.”

The New Yorker doesn’t identify the WikiLeaks activist who was the source for the documents siphoned from Tor, but the description of how the documents were obtained is similar to how a Swedish computer security consultant named Dan Egerstad intercepted government data from five Tor exit nodes he set up in 2007 — months after WikiLeaks launched — in Sweden, Asia, the United States and elsewhere.

Egerstad told Threat Level in August 2007 that he was able to read thousands of private e-mail messages sent by foreign embassies and human rights groups around the world by turning portions of the Tor internet-anonymity service into his own private listening post. The intercepted data included user names and passwords for e-mail accounts of government workers, as well as correspondence belonging to the Indian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama’s liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong.

Egerstad, who says he has no association with WikiLeaks and was not the source for the intercepted Tor documents the site received, told Threat Level at the time that he believed hackers were using the Tor network to transmit data stolen from government computers and that he was able to view the data as it passed through his node unencrypted.

Egerstad was never able to determine the identity of the hackers behind the data he intercepted, but it’s believed that he may have stumbled across the so-called Ghost Net network — an electronic spy network that had infiltrated the computers of government offices, NGOs and activist groups in more than 100 countries since at least the spring of 2007.

The Ghost Net network was exposed by other researchers last year who discovered that hackers — believed by some to be based in China — were surreptitiously stealing documents and eavesdropping on electronic correspondence on more than 1,200 computers at embassies, foreign ministries, news media outlets and nongovernmental organizations based primarily in South and Southeast Asia.

It’s not known if the data the WikiLeaks activist siphoned was data stolen by the Ghost Net hackers.

Photo: Julian Assange
Lily Mihalik/Wired.com

Wired.com and The New Yorker are both owned by Condé Nast.

See also:

• Embassy E-mail Account Vulnerability Exposes Passport Data and Official Business Matters
• Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper’s Paradise
• U.S. Soldier on 2007 Apache Attack: What I Saw
• Electronic Spy Network Focused on Dalai Lama and Embassy Computers

Geist's blog entry from this morning links ACTA with a topic that has been of recurring interest to me here, the ability of countries to produce generic versions of life-saving, but patented, medicines.

According to Geist, India is seeking allies to help it block at least the portions of ACTA that could allow seizures of shipments in transit. This would impact India, a major producer of generic medicines, as it tries to ship those medicines to third-world countries. The recipient countries, in many cases, depend on these generics to keep their people alive.

From all I've read about ACTA it's a bad deal for pretty much everyone except the big intellectual property monopolies and should probably be scrapped. Any time a treaty negotiation has to depend on secrecy and subterfuge you can pretty much bet it's a bad deal for the average person. However, scrapping ACTA still won't address the underlying problems. Copyright, patent, and other IP regimes around the world remain inconsistent, massively outdated, and increasingly lopsidedly tilted against the people who actually make and use the items that are supposed to be protected.

The Lala service has been discontinued as of May 31st, 2010.

That's the simple message that lala.com visitors find on the home page since yesterday when Apple, as promised, closed the music service it bought several months ago. But is a new iTune's music service poised to replace it? 

Some are speculating that Steve Jobs will share his plans or at least hint at them during an interview tonight with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8. I'm betting that some kind of iTune's in the cloud will be announced next Monday June 7th during it's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

More: Will Apple Announce iTunes In The Cloud June 7th?

Is Another Source of Income Shrinking?

Touring was supposed to be the savior of music. Live concerts are something fans can't download, the story went, and thus will provide a reliable source of artist income to offset slumping profits from recorded music sales.  But while some artists do still make their livings from live performances, it's not always the panacea that some would have you believe.

At least that's what UK artists Imogen Heap, a successful artist by most measures, told her fans in a short series of tweets earlier this week.

"So expensive to tour! Just had a rather depressing meeting with tour manager. Record sales low (across the industry) really impacting me."

"Sad truth is touring US especially such a monopoly. Audience end up paying double ticket price to the venue @Seattle_D. Huge mark up."

"This may be the last tour in a while. A bit emotional. Ugh. Not easy keeping afloat in this climate!"

A new Future Of Music Coalition study “Taking the Pulse” found that, of the 1,451 musicians who responded, 33% said they do not have health insurance. This is nearly twice the national average of 17% uninsured, as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (pdf of full report here.)

With that as a backdrop, the FMC is continuing its campaign to help musicians understand their health insurance options under the new health care law. Efforts include HINT, an online Health Insurance Navigation Tool, as well as, free phone consultations with trained experts. 

Earlier this week, they also assembled a panel of health insurance experts at their DC Policy Day. Here is full video via Ustream:

BillShrink, an online site dedicated to helping consumers save cash on credit cards, mobile phones and savings accounts, has launched a new service aimed at helping users save on television service.  

Overall, the BillShrink television tool is quite easy to use. Visitors need only to type in their average monthly bill amount, where they live and what kind of channels they want with their package. BillShrink also asks users to input their approximate credit score to help them get the best deal.

From there, BillShrink sifts through 10 different providers to see what's available in the user's area. It then delivers the best plans, based on user preference. Those plans are listed by the cost of monthly rates. 

I had the chance to use BillShrink's new tool, and overall, I was quite impressed. Getting to the results page was quick and easy, and ensuring that my desired features were included in each plan was simple. I was also surprised by how much I could save by switching providers.

That said, the tool does have some glitches. When I clicked the "check it out" option to ostensibly learn more about a plan, I was brought to a page asking me to call a customer service representative to take my order. The only issue is that the page wasn't populated with information. It also didn't provide any number to call.

And by doing my own independent research on the different plans, I found that the highlights that BillShrink shows in each listing, while adequate, don't provide the whole story to consumers.

That said, BillShrink's tool is worth using. It's a great place to compare pricing and then, once a users think they've found what they want, they can go to the provider's website and contact a customer service representative to determine if they really want a respective plan.

BillShrink's tool, which is currently in beta, is available now for anyone to try out.

-- Don Reisinger

twitter.com/donreisinger

Top image: BillShrink tool asking users what they want in a plan. Credit: BillShrink

Top image: BillShrink results page. Credit: BillShrink

Scott assures me that everyone's cool with the experiment and that he's going to do everything that he can do be transparent with the results. I'm taking him at his word and will be monitoring his progress.

NOTE TO SCOTT: Keep your resume updated, buddy.