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After months of delay, the Defense Department announced its new social media policy for service members using military computers.

Congress is sending President Barack Obama legislation that extends three provisions of the Patriot Act — despite heated debate among lawmakers that the surveillance measure goes too far.

The act, hastily adopted six weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, greatly expands the government’s ability to spy on Americans in the name of national security. Three measures of the act were set to expire at the end of 2009, but in December lawmakers extended the deadline to the end of February in hopes of reaching a compromise.

But no deal was reached by the end of the new Feb. 28 deadline. Instead, the Senate and House of Representatives ditched their two conflicting measures and extended the Patriot Act for another year without any changes. The final package was sent to the president Thursday for his expected signature.

Lawmakers had taken the expiration as an opportunity to revisit a number of the act’s surveillance provisions, including elements of the Patriot Act that were not expiring. This included proposals to alter the standard by which so-called National Security Letters are issued.

The letters allow the FBI, without a court order, to obtain telecommunication, financial and credit records relevant to a government investigation. The FBI issues about 50,000 NSLs annually, and an internal watchdog has found repeated abuses of the NSL powers.

At one point last year, reforming the NSL took center stage during vigorous debate in committee hearings. The Senate had moved to make it more difficult for the FBI to issue NSLs, but caved after the administration argued NSLs were assisting the fight against terrorism. A House version granted the public greater protections.

The status quo, however, prevailed this week and the NSL structure was left intact, as were the three expiring provisions. They were extended on a 315-97 House vote Thursday and by a Senate voice vote the day before.

The three extended Patriot Act provisions are:

• The “roving wiretap” provision allows the FBI to obtain wiretaps from a secret intelligence court, known as the FISA court, without identifying the target or what method of communication is to be tapped.
• The “lone wolf” measure allows FISA court warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for whatever reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. The government has said it has never invoked that provision, but the Obama administration said it wanted to retain the authority to do so.
• The “business records” provision allows FISA court warrants for any type of record, from banking to library to medical, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

Illustration: Chuckumentary/Flickr

See Also:

• Obama Backs Extending Patriot Act Spy Provisions
• Handy Chart Tracks Proposed Amendments to Patriot Act
• FBI Use of Patriot Act Authority Increased Dramatically in 2008
• Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim
• House Considers Limiting Patriot Act Spy Powers
• Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate
• Senators Vote to Renew Patriot Act Spy Powers

The Pentagon’s added yet another video game to their growing collection. This time, they’re investing in a “First Person Cultural Trainer” designed to teach one-on-one cultural sensitivity to American troops.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is backing University of Texas researchers to create the game, which is a 3D sim with scenarios in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Troops play themselves, and interact with Iraqi and Afghan civilians in replications of local villages.

It’s a project that’s been in the works for three years, and uses cultural data provided by the military. The goal of the game is to enter a village, learn about the social structures and relevant issues, and then “work with the community” to successfully finish assigned missions.

And the game is complete with a local busy-body: if villagers don’t like you, they’ll chatter amongst themselves about it. Some of the locals have “more clout” than others. Piss off the wrong person, and it’s game over.

The Pentagon have already invested in simulation games to train for war-zone combat, improve recruitment and help treat post-traumatic stress. But cultural sensitivity might be one of the most important, and most difficult, tasks to master through virtual reality. Trying to effectively replicate a nuanced, genuinely human, interaction seems nothing short of impossible. Characters in the University of Texas game can express four “emotions”: anger, fear, gladness and neutrality.

As one game expert tells Danger Room, “even moderately intelligent people will end up being able to exploit the game in order to pass. It’s one thing to know which line of dialogue will make virtual villagers like you. It’s another to say that in real life.”

It’s that kind of limitation that provides reason to doubt the Pentagon’s all-out, mega-million effort to turn much of war into a video-game scenario. Granted, the military is saving money, creating a more convenient forum for training, and appealing to a generation that grew up plugged in. But imbuing CGI characters with subtle emotion is no easy task.

As DR pal Peter Singer notes in a new article in Foreign Policy, military video games — whether designed for combat or cultural training — suggest “a far more antiseptic version of war than the real thing.”

And that, we might add, has implications for a drone operator firing a missile from a remote terminal, as well as for troops being schooled in sociability by an emotionally stunted PC.

[Photo: University of Texas]

Whitney Harper must pay the RIAA $27,750 for file sharing that began when she was 14

A federal appeals court is ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 — $750 a track — for file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader.

The decision Thursday by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a Texas federal judge who had ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400, or $200 per song. The lower court had granted her an “innocent infringer’s” exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum of $750 per track because she said she didn’t know she was violating copyrights and thought file sharing was akin to internet radio streaming.

The appeals court, however, said the woman was not eligible for such a defense — even if it was true she was between 14 and 16 years old when the infringing activity occurred on Limewire. The reason, the court concluded, is that the Copyright Act precludes such a defense if the legitimate CDs of the music in question provide copyright notices.

“Harper cannot rely on her purported legal naivety [sic] to defeat the … bar to her innocent infringer defense,” the New Orleans-based appeals court ruled unanimously, 3-0.

Harper, now 22 and a Texas Tech senior, said in 2008 interview that she didn’t know what she did was wrong when she file shared Eminem, the Police, Mariah Carey and others as a teen.

“I knew I was listening to music. I didn’t have an understanding of file sharing,” she said.

Scott Mackenzie, the woman’s attorney, said Friday that “She’s going to graduate with a federal judgment against her.” The RIAA, which has sued thousands of people for infringement, labeled Harper as “vexatious” when she refused to settle the case.

Harper’s case moved up the judicial ladder without a trial. Mackenzie said he was mulling whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Only two RIAA cases against individuals have gone to trial, both of which earned the RIAA whopping verdicts.

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA is winding down its 6-year-old litigation campaign targeting individual file sharers and instead is working with internet service providers to adopt rules that could cut off or hinder internet access to copyright scofflaws.

The first RIAA case to go to trial against an individual concerned Jammie Thomas. A Minnesota jury ordered the woman to pay $1.92 million for file sharing 24 songs. The judge in the case reduced the award to $54,000 — $2,250 a track.

The second case concerns Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University grad student who a jury ordered to pay $675,000 for file sharing 30 tracks last year. Tenenbaum has asked the judge in the case to lower the award. A decision is pending.

See Also:

• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• $675000 RIAA File Sharing Verdict Is ‘Unreasonable’
• Anti-RIAA Site Folds
• Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept.
• Authors Guild: ‘To RIAA or Not to RIAA’
• Settlement Rejected in ‘Shocking’ RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• Judge Refuses to Punish Lawyer for Anti-RIAA Blogging
• Top Internet Providers Cool to RIAA 3-Strikes Plan

The Army once planned to build a family of networked, electric-powered combat vehicles that would use information — instead of inches of armor — to help them survive on the battlefield. Now, it looks like the service is completely rethinking its approach.

Yesterday, the Army issued a request for proposals for a new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), a fleet of armored vehicles that can survive everything from relatively primitive roadside bombs to the latest anti-tank weapons. It’s an important shift: Instead of building next-gen tanks and infantry carriers suited for fighting a high-end, conventional adversary, the Army wants a more versatile vehicle that can survive “asymmetric”  threats.

Speaking today at the Association of the United States Army convention in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said the new vehicle would take into account the lessons learned from fighting insurgents in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Stew Magnuson of National Defense magazine has the key quote: “It is not just FCS warmed over,” Chiarelli said.

The general was referring to Future Combat Systems, the service’s ill-starred effort to replace its heavy armor brigades with lightweight, networked combat vehicles. Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Defense Secretary Robert Gates effectively scrapped those plans, saying that FCS vehicles did not take into account the threat from lethal, but relatively low-end, roadside bombs.

“The FCS vehicles — where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor — do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close-quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gates said.

But that doesn’t mean that the GCV will just depend on armor. According to National Defense, Chiarelli said the new vehicle would be able to incorporate some kind of active protection — the ability to detect and shoot down incoming rocket-propelled grenades or anti-tank guided missiles. The service has already worked on active protection technology: The video here shows the Raytheon “Quick Kill” active protection system developed under the rubric of the FCS program.

See Also:

• Pentagon Chief Rips Heart Out of Army’s ‘Future’
• Army Pitches ‘Future’ Killers as Job-Savers
• Pentagon Chief: Why I Tore Up the Army’s ‘Future’

While the United States and NATO press an offensive in rural southern Afghanistan, the Taliban are continuing dramatic attacks in the capital, Kabul. Earlier today, militants struck a high-rise hotel and guesthouses frequented by foreigners in the city’s relatively upscale Shahr-e-Now neighborhood.

One of the attacks hit Safi Landmark Hotel, a prominent glass-and-concrete building near Shahr-e-Now Park. Pajhwok Afghan news reports that another attack hit the Aryana guesthouse; the Wall Street Journal says attackers also infiltrated the Park Residence guesthouse.

Pajhwok also has photos from the scene. The blast in the Aryana, which was leased by the Indian embassy, killed at least five Indian citizens and wounded eight others. The New York Times says the attacks claimed the lives of 18 people in all.

Attacks targeting foreigners are not new: A 2008 attack on the Serena Hotel, a high-end destination that is a favorite for diplomats, international news crews and visiting politicians, caused a major stir in Kabul. But militants began targeting foreigners in the capital as long ago as 2004, when a suicide attacker armed with a string of grenades hit Chicken Street, a street lined with shops and carpet stores that is a traditional destination for souvenir-hunting foreigners.

But the attacks also seem to be deliberately targeting Indian interests in Afghanistan. While India is not a member of the U.S./NATO-led coalition, the attacks in Kabul’s city center come as India and Pakistan begin the first official talks since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, blamed on Pakistan-based extremists.

Update 1: Danger Room pal Robert Young Pelton, currently in Kabul with a new project, notes that these attacks were a depressingly regular feature of life in the capital, well before the Marjah offensive. The December bomb attack against the Heetal Plaza Hotel, for instance, was also directed at the business interests of Jalaluddin Rabbani, son of former president and Jamiat-e Islami leader Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Update 2: The New York Times has an excellent gallery of the chaotic scene in Shahr-e-Now.

[PHOTO: Pajhwok Afghan News]

Born at 10:35 am on February 23rd, weighing in at 7 pounds 8 ounces, measuring 20 inches in length, meet… Leonardo “Leo” Visceglia Shachtman.

Named after his great-grandfathers Lee Guber, the renowned Broadway producer, and Leon Shachtman, the world traveler and gentleman’s gentleman, Leo is now resting comfortably at home with his mother. His dad is completely smitten with them both. He’s taking a break from blogging to be with them as much as he can.

The U.S. military monitored Planned Parenthood and a white supremacist group as part of the government’s security preparations for the 2002 Olympics in Utah, according to new documents released by the Department of Defense.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command liaison collected and disseminated information on U.S. citizens who were members of Planned Parenthood and the white supremacist group National Alliance regarding their involvement in protests and distributing literature, according to an intelligence-oversight report released by the Pentagon. The documents indicate that the JFC liaison was working with the FBI’s Olympic Intelligence Center at the time.

This and other intelligence-activity disclosures appear in heavily redacted documents that were released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They came in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act project the organization is conducting to obtain oversight information from intelligence agencies.

EFF received more than 800 pages from intelligence oversight reports created by the Defense Department inspector general that examine actions, conducted by various branches of the department, that are believed to be illegal.

The reports cover the years 2001 to 2008 and were submitted to the Intelligence Oversight Board and cover the U.S. Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military entities. The board is composed of private citizens with security clearances who are supposed to submit to the office of the president any reports describing activities that are believed to be illegal.

The reports provide little context for the information that’s disclosed, leaving the public to wonder about the nature and extent of the information and surveillance revealed in them.

Pertaining to the Planned Parenthood members, for example, the oversight report provides no explanation about how the information was collected. Nor does it indicate why the information was collected and notes only that military intelligence is not allowed to collect and disseminate information on U.S. persons unless the information constitutes “foreign intelligence.” The report indicates that the collection was therefore “clearly outside the purview of military intelligence” and should have been handled by law enforcement.

Another oversight document discusses an incident involving the interception of civilian cellphone conversations of U.S. persons in April 2007. During a field exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, a Signals Intelligence noncommissioned officer operating a SIGINT collection system intercepted the cell phone calls, though the document doesn’t indicate if they were intercepted on U.S. soil or outside U.S. borders.

Initial reports indicated that the noncommissioned officer listened to the conversations for entertainment purposes, and the incident was reported to the National Security Agency. But the inspector-general document indicates that the officer never admitted to this and indicates only that he may have listened to some conversations “longer than necessary to do his job.”

Five months after the incident, the SIGINT staff at Fort Polk was given a refresher on United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause and provides instructions for destroying incidental interceptions that are collected unintentionally.

Another document obtained by EFF reveals that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations set up a “honey-pot” website in May 2006 “to identify & exploit foreign threats to DoD” and only realized in October 2007 that it potentially violated a sealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order.

“[D]uring the course of coordinating the operation with another agency,” the document states, “it was realized that the collection of some information targeting non-U.S. persons may be incongruent with a Spring ‘07 classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISC) opinion which may require a FISA warrant for legal interception in such cyber operations.”

Because the court order was sealed, the AFOSI staff didn’t know about it and only realized it might be applicable to their honey-pot project when they read about the order in the press. The Air Force halted the honey-pot operation and its “potential questionable activity” and asked the Justice Department for a copy of the sealed FISA Court order, but was denied access to it. At the time of the oversight report in 2008, the AFOSI still had not obtained clarification about the contents of the FISAC order.

A document from a 2008 oversight report indicates that Army Cyber Counterintelligence officers attended a Black Hat security conference without disclosing their Army affiliation. The conference, held annually in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., attracts hackers and security professionals from around the world. It’s also a hotbed gathering for undercover law enforcement and intelligence agents from around the world who come to learn about the latest computer security vulnerabilities and what specific hackers are up to. The documents don’t indicate if the officers collected any information on conference attendees.

EFF expects to receive additional documents from the Defense Department, as well as from the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Photo: PDX Pixels/Flickr

See Also:

• Inside Operation Highlander: The NSA’s Wiretapping of Americans Abroad

Alissa J. Rubin, the Times's Kabul bureau chief, is answering readers' questions about the ongoing military operation in Marja, Afghanistan.

Cryptome, the secret-document-spilling site, is back online Thursday, after Microsoft withdrew a copyright complaint that shuttered the site the day before.

Microsoft’s efforts to suppress a document about how to subpoena online user data backfired, leading instead to widespread attention to (and republication of) the document it tried to suppress.

Microsoft did not apologize in its Thursday statement, and defended its use of copyright law to keep its law enforcement manual private.

Like all service providers, Microsoft must respond to lawful requests from law enforcement agencies to provide information related to criminal investigations. We take our responsibility to protect our customers privacy very seriously, so have specific guidelines that we use when responding to law enforcement requests. In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed. We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document’s removal.

Cryptome’s proprietor John Young published the 22-page document earlier this week. leading Microsoft to take legal action Tuesday. The document, which contains no trade secrets, advises law enforcement how to file subpoenas (.pdf), outlines what data Microsoft keeps on users of its online services such as Xbox Live and Hotmail, and explains how to parse the resulting user data.

Cryptome’s hosting provider, Network Solutions, chose to shutter the entire site and lock down the domain name, even before the Thursday deadline for Young to remove the document. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S.-based host is immune to liability if it makes sure the allegedly offending content is taken down during the time that a counter-claim is being considered in court.

Similar manuals from other large service providers such as Yahoo and Facebook have also been leaked and published online recently. Yahoo also tried unsuccessfully to use the DMCA to suppress its document. However, there is a clear news value to publishing such documents, even if they’re copyrighted.

Microsoft took nearly 24 hours to respond to an inquiry for comment, losing the opportunity to quickly leapfrog to the forefront of transparency by understanding that such documents need not — and should not — be hidden from users (with the possible exception of the law enforcement hotline number).

Cox Communications, which runs the nation’s third largest ISP, has long made its law enforcement subpoena page — including prices — public.

But Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo do not follow that example, even though all of them want their users to trust them with their most sensitive data and communications. Nor do any of them publish the most basic statistics on how often law enforcement comes knocking with subpoenas and warrants.

In fact, the simplest lesson here is that none of the pixels published over this incident would have been necessary if Microsoft had just published this document in the first place, which few people would have ever bothered to go read. Instead, these companies prefer to worry about the sensitivities of corporate-ass-covering lawyers and law enforcement agencies instead of putting their users and transparency first.

Photo: Emma Swann, Front page photo: Robert Scoble

See Also:

• Microsoft Takes Down Whistleblower Site, Read the Secret Doc Here
• Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse …
• Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List
• Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats

Anti-war group Code Pink now claims that an ex-employee of Blackwater, the improbably named Johnnie Walker, threatened activist Tighe Barry during yesterday’s hearing on Blackwater/Paravant/Xe/whatever. What, did someone wave the jazz hands at him?

A Wisconsin teenager was sentenced to 15 years in prison Wednesday for an extortion scheme that had him tricking male classmates into sending them nude photos of themselves, then blackmailing them with exposure if they didn’t have sex with him.

In 2008, defendant Anthony Stancl, who was 18 at the time, posed as a girl on Facebook and tricked more than 30 male classmates into sending him photos of themselves. According to court documents (.pdf), authorities found 300 photos of underage males on his computer as well as video of some of the victims exposing their genitals and masturbating; some of the victims were 15 years old.

The photos were stored in 40 folders on Stancl’s computer, each of which was named after a victim whose photos were in the folder. In one case, police found 24 pictures of a single victim. The scheme occurred for about a year from November 2007 to November 2008, when victims came forward.

At least seven of the victims said that Stancl, posing as a girl, threatened to post their nude pictures on the internet or send them to their friends unless they engaged in sexual activity with a male friend of “hers.” When the victims met with the male friend, who was Stancl, the perpetrator performed oral sex on the victims and took a photo of the activity with his cellphone.

One of the victims, who was 16 at the time, reported that after allowing Stancl to perform oral sex on him, the girl “Kayla” said it wasn’t enough and threatened to post the oral sex pictures online if the victim didn’t have anal sex with Stancl. After this occurred on two occasions, “Kayla” demanded the victim send her a nude photo of his brother as well. The victim then went to his parents, who contacted police.

Stancl told the victims that he was an extortion victim himself and was being forced to have sex with them and photograph it in order to prevent other photos of himself from being exposed.

His attorney, Craig Kuhary, says that Stancl’s activity was prompted by anxiety over his sexual orientation and the alienation he felt after he was humiliated and outed by another student.

Stancl claimed he had been sexually assaulted by an upperclassman during his sophomore year. He’d been attracted to the student and when they met, Stancl says the student forced him to have oral sex. After this, other students began spreading rumors about him and doctoring photos of him to suggest he was gay. His attorney says he lost a number of friends over this and became a loner.

“He had a strong desire to fit in with everyone,” Kuhary told Threat Level. “I think that was why he went to the great length he did to appear that he wasn’t gay and was just a victim [of extortion] like they were…. He was never comfortable with the fact that he was bisexual so he came up with an elaborate scheme to cover that to appear to be a normal heterosexual teen.”

Stancl’s illegal activity, however, wasn’t limited to sex crimes. He was expelled from New Berlin Eisenhower High School for allegedly making a bomb threat in November 2008. On Nov. 12, two students found a note written on the wall of a men’s bathroom that read “Bomb 11/14/08.” Law enforcement conducted a sweep of the school but found no explosives. The next day, two school administrators and a science teacher received an e-mail that read in part: “Good luck tomorrow. Boom. It won’t be your average one either. It will be one that is manned. Not by me, but by those who follow me.”

Officials traced the e-mail to the New Berlin Public Library and ultimately to Stancl, who admitted he sent the e-mails. He denied writing the note on the bathroom wall, however, and said he sent the e-mails the next day only to “make it a better story.”

The sexual allegations only came to light after Stancl was already being investigated for the bomb threat.

Stancl was charged with soliciting sex from minors, possessing child pornography and making a bomb threat. He pleaded no contest in December to two Wisconsin felonies — repeated sexual assault of the same child and third-degree sexual assault. At his sentencing, according to the Associated Press, he apologized, saying he understood the distress his victims experienced.

Kuhary says the statement included an apology to each of the victims, the school district, Stancl’s classmates and his family.

He added that Stancl faced a possible sentence of 30 years but that the goal was to “attempt to salvage this young man’s life so that he would have a good number of years left whenever he completed his sentence.”

The district attorney in Waukesha County, where the case was brought, did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

See also:

• Man Charged in Facebook Sex-Extortion Plot

In Operation Moshtarak, the current NATO offensive in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, commanders have a powerful tool at their disposal: cash, and lots of it. According to Lindy Cameron, head of the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, the fighting is being quickly followed by “cash-for-work” programs meant to put local communities back to work, along with other reconstruction projects.

Cash for work, however, has some risks of its own. The biggest potential problem is fraud, often in the form of the “phantom project” (a task that is never actually undertaken or completed) or the “phantom staff” (payrolls that are padded with no-shows). But tracking dollars in cash-for-work schemes is essential. As the U.S. Agency for International Development learned in Iraq, money spent unwisely on public works schemes can end up in the hands of insurgents.

So how do you track cash-for-work in a place like Helmand, where fighting still rages? John Stephens, who manages programs in Afghanistan for the U.S. charity Mercy Corps, came up with one solution: Use cameras with GPS to verify aid projects in insecure places where expatriate staff can’t oversee projects in person.

The idea is simple: If an area is too dicey to send in expats, Mercy Corps sends in Afghan staff with GPS cameras — either a Nikon point-and-shoot, or a Garmin handheld GPS with built-in camera — to verify that the projects are actually being undertaken in the right places, so they can pay wages. The data is then uploaded to a Google Earth–style program, so Mercy Corps — which implements USAID projects — can track projects and their participants.

In Afghanistan, this kind of accountability is key. As the Washington Post reports today, U.S. officials are concerned about a “blizzard of cash” that is being hand-carried out of the country. Some of that money may be legit, but there’s also a serious concern that the U.S. government may be indirectly fueling corruption through a massive infusion of aid dollars to do everything from building roads to picking up trash and cleaning canals.

“Everyone who’s there is holding vigil,” Stephens told Danger Room. “The moment you turn away for a second, that’s when corruption can blossom. Especially with cash-for-work, because there’s so much money involved.”

Using GPS cameras, Stephens said, “extends the reach of our program managers. So on the one hand, it was about volume — you put cameras in people’s hands, and they go out and photograph it and upload it to Google Earth and verify it — and in other places … you can expand the service to communities where it’s too insecure to work, or too remote.”

It’s a model that Mercy Corps is applying to other places where it operates. Stephens said using GPS cameras was also an option for aid projects in places like Congo, Somalia and the tribal regions of Pakistan.

Of course, technology isn’t the only solution. If you want to read a fascinating account of another way of managing these programs, read Tim Lynch’s accounts of running cash-for-work in contested urban areas in Afghanistan — places like Kandahar, Gardez, Lashkar Gah and Jalalabad. “There are no security teams, no armored vehicles, no guarded compounds, no nothing — just a small life-support payment for the two internationals to rent guesthouse rooms and pay for food,” he wrote last year. “The project managers provide their own security.”

Not everyone can do what Lynch and his colleagues do: They have years of experience, language skills and local ties that allow them to work more independently. But using cameras and GPS is another option that merits a closer look, particularly as the administration pushes a civilian-development surge to match the military effort in Afghanistan.

“This is in furtherance of our mission and making sure that we get into those communities that need it the most,” Stephens said. “It’s not about having an eye in the sky, having a ‘humanitarian Predator’ out there that is keeping an eye on communities.”

Photo: U.S. Department of Defense

During yesterday’s Senate hearing on government oversight of security contractors, an interesting tidbit emerged. In his prepared testimony, Fred Roitz, executive vice president of contracts and chief sales officer for Xe (a.k.a. Blackwater), disclosed that his company, through its subsidiary Presidential Airways, evacuated a congressman from Niger during a recent military coup.

That caught the eye of Mother Jones reporter Daniel Schulman, who decided to figure out who, exactly, the congressman in distress was.

Turns out it was none other than Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who has made his reputation by going after military contractors. Irony alert! Grayson spokesman Todd Jurkowski confirmed that Grayson was spirited out of the country on a Xe helicopter, and offered this statement to Schulman: “The flight was arranged through the State Department … The congressman did not know, and frankly did not care, who owned the plane.”

If anything, this little episode further underscores some wisdom from our pal Peter Singer. Contractors: Can’t win with ‘em, can’t go to war without ‘em. Or more precisely, can’t have diplomatic security without ‘em.

As I’ve noted here before, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security — which would have the lead in protecting members of Congress traveling outside the country — has relied heavily on outsourcing. Blackwater/Xe has (rightfully, in many cases) come in for a lot of criticism, but very few questions seem to be raised about the “customer,” i.e., the federal government.

[PHOTO: Grayson.house.gov]

Talking politics at a barbershop in Baghdad.

Yelp, the online review site, is being accused of extortion in a class-action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles this week.

The suit alleges that the site tried to get a Long Beach veterinary hospital named Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital to pay $300 a month — for a minimum 12-month commitment — to suppress or delete reviews that disparaged the hospital.

The popular San Francisco–based site Yelp is one of the leading sites for consumers to post reviews and comments about their local businesses and services. It touts its integrity with the slogan: “Real people. Real reviews.” The company was founded in 2004 and has spread throughout the Unitd States. It launched in the United Kingdom and Ireland last year.

But according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court (.pdf) for the Central District of California, the site manipulates the reviews, and therefore a business’ ratings, through an extortion scheme that offers to remove a business’ negative reviews or relocate them to the bottom of a listing page where fewer visitors will see them, if the business purchases a monthly advertising subscription.

“Yelp thus capitalizes on the presumed integrity of the Yelp.com ratings system to extort business owners to purchase advertising,” says the complaint. “As a result, business listings on Yelp.com, contrary to the website’s ‘Real people. Real reviews.’ mantra, are in fact biased in favor of businesses that buy Yelp advertising.”

The suit alleges that last September, Cats and Dogs owner Dr. Gregory Perrault became aware of a negative review posted on Yelp by a user named Chris R. Perrault viewed it as defamatory and possibly false.

He researched the information in the review and discovered that it referred to a hospital visit that occurred more than 18 months prior to its posting. (Yelp’s policy allows reviews to be posted within 12 months of an experience with the business.) The hospital asked Yelp to remove the review for violating Yelp’s review guidelines, and the site complied. But a second negative review appeared five days later from a user identified as Kay K.

That review read in part:

Dr. Perrault is the rudest vet I’ve ever been to … probably one of the rudest people I’ve had the displeasure of meeting. I agree with the previous reviews about making you feel like an unfit mom. My pup had been sick and I had a theory on what the problem may have been and he wouldn’t even entertain the idea, but instead, made me feel bad because my dog got sick. And, my poor dog was terrified of him! He made me feel like I was 2 inches tall and repeatedly looked down his nose at me. Oh, and OVER PRICED! OMG! Who does he think he is??? I did not feel welcomed by him nor his staff. I paid you for a service! No need to treat me so bad!

The plaintiff claims that Yelp sales staff then began calling the hospital frequently with “high-pressure” tactics promising to move or delete negative reviews in exchange for purchasing a one-year advertising contract. The site also allegedly promised to ensure that negative reviews wouldn’t appear in Google or other search engine results. When the hospital declined, the negative review from “Chris R.” re-appeared on the site, followed by a second negative review from Kay K.

The latter review referred to Dr. Perrault as “an @$$” and “a jerk, a D-Bag, And so arrogant.”

I ran in to him in a neighborhood store right after he saw my poor sick dog at his clinic and he looked right at me, recognized me, rolled his eyes and looked away!!!! Seriously, someone needs to knock this guy down to the size he really is. He needs to drop his Napolean complex and be a professional. After my horrible experience with him, I took my sick dog to Bixby Animal Clinic and I have never had a more pleasant vet experience! Go there instead! My dog loved everyone there!

When the hospital complained to Yelp, the site sent a letter to the hospital saying it would be leaving the reviews in place.

“Because we don’t have firsthand knowledge of a reviewer’s identity or personal experience, we are not in a position to verify your claims that these reviewers are the same person, or that they are connected to the recent vandalism at your hospital,” the letter read. “If a review appears to reflect the personal opinion and experiences of the reviewer while adhering to our review guidelines [link], it is our policy to allow the reviewer to stand behind his or her review.”

The suit’s claims seemed to be backed up by an East Bay Express article published last year that also accused the site of running an extortion racket. In that piece, numerous business owners described similar scenarios to the one alleged by the plaintiff. The Oakland, California–based newspaper later reported that after its first story published, many more businesses from around the country contacted it to complain of similar experiences.

“Yelp’s sales tactics amount to high-tech extortion,” said plaintiff attorney Jared Beck in a press release. “The victims tend to be small businesses, such as our client, who often have no choice but to pay Yelp exorbitant sums in order to prevent further harm to their livelihoods.”

Yelp recently received a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners through the purchase of preferred stock with a plan to invest an additional $75 million through purchases of employee and shareholder stock. The site earns revenue from search and display ads.

The company claims that its site had more than 26 million unique visitors in December 2009 and that it has published more than 9 million reviews.

Yelp recently walked away from discussions with Google to buy the company for about $550 million.

Yelp released a written statement in response to the lawsuit.

“The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews,” the statement read. “These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.”

Microsoft 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.

Photo: Emma Swann

See Also:

• Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse …
• Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List
• Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats

The Chinese government is imposing new internet restrictions demanding personal-website operators to acquire central-government permission to operate their sites.

The latest censorship measure, which covers .cn domestic domains, comes as Google is trying to convince Chinese censors to ease up. Google said 43 days ago it would undertake a self-imposed exile from China if the government does not back off from requiring it to censor search results.

The government said the latest move — which also requires site owners to submit a photograph and to show identification — was targeted at tackling pornography. Critics, though said it was based on silencing political dissent. China did not say when the rules would be enforced.

The plan underscores that China is not likely to blink in its confrontation with Google, at least not anytime soon. That leaves Google lingering in an ethical and business crossroads as the days tick from its Jan. 12 announcement that it would leave China if it has to continue censoring search results there.

Google declined Wednesday to directly address negotiations surrounding its China announcement.

“We are not commenting on what might or might not be happening,” Google spokesman Scott Rubin said in a telephone interview.

China is known for having some of the world’s strictest holds on the internet.

Last year, the Chinese government decided to mandate censorship software called Green Dam in all new PCs (to which manufacturers acquiesced). In March it blocked YouTube because of videos of anti-Tibetan violence, a block that remains. Then the government began hammering on Google, claiming the search engine was steering too many people to pornography.

Illustration: TheG

See Also:

• China Censors: The Tiananmen Square Anniversary Will Not Be Tweeted
• Google to Stop Censoring Search Results in China After Hack Attack
• Web Censor Seeks $2.2 Billion for China Hack
• China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’ - Updated
• China Stands Firm in Response to Google Threat

Online 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.

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.”

See Also:

• Google Execs Convicted in Italy for Down Syndrome Video
• A Victory for Pirate Bay in Italy
• Wired Backs Internet for Nobel Peace Prize
• In Italy, CIA Agents Are Undone by Their Cellphones
• Google to Stop Censoring Search Results in China After Hack Attack

The Pentagon’s after a better way to strike back against infectious diseases and bio-threats. Now, a team at Texas A&M may have come up with a way to turn tobacco plants into vaccine-making machines.

Darpa, the military’s risk-taking research agency, is investing $40 million into the Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium, which will test the tobacco-based method and then offer up 10 million doses of H1N1 vaccines. Once the process has been vetted, the researchers anticipate a scalability that could yield 100 million vaccine doses per month.

Plant-based vaccine production has been in the workings for years now, including the successful creation of edible bananas that protect against the Norwalk virus. Last summer, Darpa requested proposals for plant-based options that would rapidly yield protective antigens for the creation of potent vaccines. Tobacco is a particularly good option, because it’s cheap and grows quickly — yielding vaccines in weeks, rather than the several months required for the standard egg-based method that’s been used since the 1950s.

Darpa’s been funding fast-tracked medication production since 2005, when the agency launched their Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program. Although Darpa was already funding research into Avian Flu protection, they realized that H1N1 was a more pressing priority. “In response to the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, AMP’s plant-based platform redirected its rapid scale-up processes that were initially developed for avian influenza,” Darpa’s announcement states.

The Texas A&M consortium also received $21 million from Darpa for the creation of Project GreenVax, which will work towards the quick, plant-based production of a myriad of vaccines. Having the program in place would offer a method to mitigate newly emerging viruses before they turn into widespread pandemics. The project will be housed in a custom-built, 21-acre compound, which features a 145,000 square foot “biotherapeutic production facility” that uses mobile “pods” to grow the plants.

The plant-based vaccine production method works by isolating a specific antigen protein — one that triggers a human immune response — from the targeted virus. A gene from the protein is transferred to bacteria, which are then used to “infect” plant cells. The plants then start producing the exact protein that will be used for vaccinations. From first transfer to final extraction, the method takes around five weeks.

And the cheap, massively scalable strategy could also help those in developing countries, where vaccines are often too expensive or otherwise inaccessible.

It’s probably too late for Darpa’s swine-flu greenhouse to make a dent in H1N1 protection - assuming the plant pods work, they’ll still need to undergo FDA testing. The good news for Darpa-funded researchers is that the influenza outbreaks just keep coming: scientists are now warning that if Avian flu teams up with H1N1, the result could be “a super nightmare for the whole world.”

[Photo: carper.senate.gov]