Disinformation Campaign Proves Effective as Anti-SOPA Strike-Breaker

Two or three days ago, announcements were broadcast on various Media Outlets stating that two bills in the Congress and the Senate, SOPA and PROTECT-IP were effectively “Dead-in-the-Water,” resulting in the cancellation (or extreme reduction) of what would have been an extremely disruptive– and therefore highly dramatic– strike/protest by Major Internet Companies against the proposed legislation.

The fact that no sources were actually named, as well as the coordinated nature of this spurious disinformation campaign, indicates that this legislation, involving a precipitous curtailment of the Civil Liberties in the United States, indicates a scope of political interests far beyond those of the Entertainment Industry.

History shows us that a curtailment of Civil Liberties is never instituted without an eye to a further attack on those same liberties at a later date.

This debate is not over. Expect to hear opponents to these bills caricatured as disgruntled pirates of popular entertainment, 20-somethings living in their mothers’ basements, who want to continue downloading music and movies without having to pay for the privilege.

Expect to read further, and ever more disturbing, developments in the coming months.

View A Legal Analysis of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service

Wall Street Declares War on America (Yes, this constitutes Conspiracy!)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Admits Cities Coordinated Crackdown on Occupy Movement

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to clearly imply that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

Information flow can reveal malicious intent

Analysis of Enron e-mails reveals structure of corrupt networks

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, hub-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

While today Enron is associated with corporate fraud, for years the energy and commodities company was a Wall Street darling. Fortune magazine named Enron America’s most innovative company for six consecutive years ending in 2000. But by the next year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the firm’s dealings.

“They were not only innovative technologically and administratively, but also in their accounting practices,” said Aven.

Aven’s analysis compared communications regarding three legitimate innovative projects and three corrupt ones that went by the names JEDI, Chewco and Talon. Communications regarding the shady deals took on a hub-and-spoke shape, a setup that maximizes secrecy and control. A small, relatively informed clique occupies the hub at the center, communicating with protruding spokes that don’t share ties with each other. The hub gets information from the spokes, which in their isolation are less likely to whistle-blow and can be played off each other.

Recognizing that content alters flow is crucial, said Ramakrishna Akella, an expert in information management from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Much of network modeling relies on statistics and algorithms that too often ignore content, he said. “Mining content is very insightful,” said Akella. The sudden appearance of new words or acronyms, for example, can signal the emergence of innovations.

That the sneaky behavior employed to cover the corrupt “innovations” at Enron might have been revealed just by diagramming who is e-mailing whom suggests that the structures of social networks might be a good diagnostic tool. Probing the shapes of social networks might help investigators identify electronic dens of intrigue, such as people communicating within a terrorist network, said Aven.

And the work suggests that networks aren’t just static conduits for information.

“It’s intriguing,” said Aven. “We’ve treated social networks as contained plumbing systems directing the flow of information, but we should think about them as water that carves river beds of social relations.”

Aven’s analysis revealed that, on average, employees sent roughly five e-mails about legitimate projects for every one about those that were corrupt. Transitivity — the tendency of two people who know the same person to also know each other — also dropped markedly in the network of corrupt communications. And reciprocity — back-and-forth rather than one-way communication — plummeted.

Read full story at Science News

IP Address Hijacking

A couple of years ago, I was watching some streaming video (I forget what it was exactly, probably something like the Daily Show or a music video). Suddenly, the connection slowed to a complete crawl. I looked out my window at the street, and saw a guy sitting there in his car, typing on a laptop. The wireless connection belonged to my roommate, and he either didn’t know how, or was to lazy to set any security on the connection. The guy was obviously poaching off our wireless connection, and since I was paying for my share of the wireless, and this guy was obviously affecting my download, I went out to his car and approached him. At first, he took offense, claiming the airwaves were free. But I mentioned that I was, in fact, paying for the connection, so it obviously wasn’t free. And then I started muttering darkly about theft of signal (something about which I still don’t know the first thing about), and told him I was on my way to discuss this matter with the local gendarmes. He took off.

(Having poached many such connections I felt like such a hypocrite, but I was trying to stream some video, and he was fucking up my signal. Oh well…)

I didn’t think about it at the time, but there was a larger issue involved that I didn’t even realize until I read this:

Laws on proving identities online remain murky

James Temple
Sunday, July 24, 2011

This column recently explored the predicament of Jane, the local grandmother who says a law firm is pressuring her to pay $3,400 to settle accusations that she illegally downloaded pornography.

Her case and at least tens of thousands of others instigated by adult and mainstream media companies are all based on what an Internet protocol [IP] address, the string of numbers an Internet service provider assigns an account, is purportedly seen doing online. Meanwhile, major ISPs recently agreed to scold and even penalize customers when media companies say their account was spotted accessing unauthorized content, a policy that could affect far more Internet users.

All of which raises an important question of the digital age: Are you your IP address? Are you culpable for anything and everything that those numbers are witnessed doing online?

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/23/BUKQ1KDU1K.DTL#ixzz1T3qDBfVk