Is Kaspersky anti-spyware...or is it Russian government spyware? That's the question for US state & local gov't users.

Arguably one of the best-known Russian companies in the world is Kaspersky Labs, the maker of anti-spyware software. Cheekily, you may say that if anyone knows how to spy on others online, it's the Russians given that the US presidency is currently enmeshed in several investigations involving Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections. Forthcoming additional sanctions against Russia (among others) aside, however, the commercial implications of alleged Russian spying are limited.

Consider Kaspersky, though. Given its line of business and the country it hails from, it's become something of a hot potato for government procurement Stateside in the anti-spyware arena. Given that the putative head of the US federal government is the president, you may be amused to note that it's the federal government and not local or state governments who have provided guidance against buying Kaspersky's stuff. From the Washington Post:

The federal agency in charge of purchasing, the General Services Administration, this month removed Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab from its list of approved vendors. In doing so, the agency’s statement suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Russian government backdoor access to the systems it protects, though they offered no explanation or evidence of it. Kaspersky has strongly denied coordinating with the Russian government and has offered to cooperate with federal investigators.

This action has left state and local governments in a quandary whether to follow suit in avoiding Kaspersky-branded products which some believe may open a backdoor for Russian state spies into US government activities:

The GSA’s move on July 11 has left state and local governments to speculate about the risks of sticking with the company or abandoning taxpayer-funded contracts, sometimes at great cost. The lack of information from the GSA underscores a disconnect between local officials and the federal government about cybersecurity.

The guy on the right can pretend to be a huckster like the guy on the left...when it suits.

[DISCLAIMER: The blogger is an investor in Alibaba.] Well, here's another entry in this seemingly never-ending parade of international businesspersons pledging jobs Stateside for American workers. If you don't know Jack Ma, you really should. He's the Chinese founder of Alibaba, the world's largest business-to-business ["B2B"] site, bar none. It's quite an accomplishment considering that he's not American, although China is arguably better-placed as a producer nation as opposed to a consumer nation like the United States.

That said, Alibaba is seeking to extend its foothold elsewhere, including the United States. Clearly, it would make sense for more US-based firms to use Alibaba's B2B portal since it's the most extensive one worldwide. Also, Alibaba is seeking to make inroads as well into the business-to-consumer ["B2C"] markets. In the American context, it means to encroach on Amazon's turf in other words. Conversely, Ma's also been promoting its consumer platforms for US retailers seeking an Internet presence in China.

Recently, Jack Ma--worth north of $30 billion and far eclipsing Donald Trump's wealth--nevertheless went to Trump Tower to lobby for his company. By introducing lines of business to US firms and consumers, Ma suggests he will be creating a million jobs Stateside:

On Monday, Alibaba BABA, Chief Executive Jack Ma became the latest CEO to tout job creation after a 40-minute meeting with Trump in the newly-minted politician’s gold-plated tower. There’s no better music to President-elect Donald Trump’s ears than pledges from CEOs to keep jobs in the U.S. or to create new ones. Trump ran much of his campaign on ensuring U.S. jobs are kept away from foreigners and aren’t outsourced to other countries, and he’s gone through great, highly-publicized lengths to prove his election is the reason why jobs are coming to or staying in America.

However, Ma’s assertion that he’s going to create a million new jobs in the U.S. by helping small businesses sell products and services to China is a stretch. The Chinese e-commerce giant is merely upping its own investments to appeal to U.S. small businesses, providing them with incentives, such as user data and logistics capabilities, in hopes that more American brands will sell items on its e-commerce sites. The increased demand on those U.S. goods from the Chinese middle class will prompt, it hopes, increased hiring as U.S. brands expand to meet the heightened demand.

Ma beats the BS artist Trump at Trump's own game. What is Alibaba really doing for its US customers? It's essentially providing expanded data analytics: who buys what, when, where and how. Does doing so create American jobs? At the most, very indirectly. Still, it's assuredly not a waste of Jack Ma's time if he [i] stops Trump from tweeting negatively about Alibaba, [ii] helps get Alibaba off the US blacklist of counterfeiter-friendly outlets, and [iii] forestalls measures to close US cyberspace to non-American service providers like Alibaba as per Trump's protectionist leanings.

Jack Ma didn't become a multibillionaire being stupid--even if he does have to suffer a fool like Trump once in a while.  

1/13/2017 UPDATE: Amazon and its marketplaces may have been the inspiration for Ma's rather dubious US job creation math. That said, Amazon is still more modest about the jobs it estimates are attributable to it acting as an online marketplace. Amazon is actually more believable since it has other offerings like acting as a distributor of e-books and so forth:

Amazon said that its Marketplace is the “indirect” creator of 300,000 jobs for those who have started or are growing these businesses by selling on the e-commerce giant’s site. Last year, more than 100,000 sellers generated more than $100,000 each in sales, the company said.

The company attributes this same sort of job and sales creation to its Kindle Direct Publishing feature, which allows users to self-publish books, Amazon Web Services, and the Amazon Flex program, which gives people the chance to earn up to $25 per hour delivering Amazon packages.

Earlier this week Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. promised something similar: 1 million new U.S. jobs by helping small businesses. However, the number of actual full-time jobs these sorts of marketplaces create are small, MarketWatch found.

Psst...got the latest episode of Doctor Who?

One of the more curious things that software copyright holders have to deal with is the global public's willingness to "steal" intellectual property despite being quite averse to stealing tangible (read: manufactured) goods. Why do folks show little guilt about the former but more with the latter? Are punishments for physical theft worse, is there a social taboo to such acts, or both? That such attitudes are widespread in the largest of consumer markets in the developing world may not be all that encouraging to software firms.

As a scholar of Internet governance and intellectual property, torrent sites have been a recurrent source of fascination for me [1, 2, 3]. Out of curiosity, the latest evolution I noticed was of the widely-known torrent site Kickass Torrents moving its top-level domain once again. What's .so? I looked it up and, to my unvarnished delight, it stands for Somalia. It is of course perfectly reasonable to say that there isn't really a country of "Somalia" but three contested regions of Somaliland, Puntland and Somalia. It's a failed state, after all. No matter; in cyberspace, there is such a (virtual) place:

With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is one of the most used torrent sites. In recent months it has even rivaled The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic. Over the years KAT has moved from domain to domain on a few occasions, to evade law enforcement and pressure from the entertainment industries. Most recently the site had been operating from the Kickass.to domain. Starting today however, the site is serving its pages from the Somalian TLD Kickass.so.

In a game of cat and mouse, Kickass regularly rotates its top-level domain to avoid restrictions and censors. Recently Google began screening its search results more thoroughly. Therefore, Torrent Freak suspects this change is a way of temporarily avoiding Google's dragnet--until it catches up with the move at least:

“We are moving to kickass.so now. As you know we change our domain regularly. Nothing more has been changed for you, so don’t worry, you can use Kickass as usually, it’s automatically redirected,” the KAT team writes. Intended or not, the domain change will have some consequences on the anti-piracy front. For example, the site will become accessible again in most countries where it has been blocked previously.

In addition all the URLs that were blocked by Google through DMCA notices, more than 1.6 million, will become accessible again under the new domain. This also means that Google’s new downranking algorithm will be bypassed, at least temporarily. In recent weeks KAT has lost a significant amount of traffic due to Google’s new anti-piracy measure, so intended or not, that may be an extra incentive to keep the yearly domain rotations going.

The other obviously fascinating thing about Somalia is that it's been a haven for real-life maritime pirates during the past few years. Even if such piracy has been declining as of late, it's still got a reputation as a pirate's den. In either case--for software pirates or maritime pirates--the impetus for choosing Somalia in its virtual or not-so-virtual iterations is exactly the same: there are no real "authorities" to speak of policing cyberspace or lawless regions of a failed state.

Screening instructional videos is one of their tasks.

Your feelgood story of the day comes courtesy of Bangladesh's social entrepreneurs known as the "infoladies." Like vast swathes of the developing world, many parts of Bangladesh do not have Internet connections or other things many in the developed world take for granted. However, this does not mean that ICT are not helpful for purposes such as viewing world prices of crops on world markets when deciding what to plant, talking to relatives working abroad as migrant workers, accessing medical information and so forth. What are the needs technologically met by the infoladies? Businessweek has a neat photo essay on this matter:

Only 5 million of Bangladesh’s 152 million citizens have regular Internet access. Three-quarters live in rural villages. The Infoladies, a group of about 50 women in their early 20s, travel through the countryside equipped with a laptop computer, a tablet, a smartphone, a digital camera, and a glucometer ministering to the technologically impoverished.

The traveling infoladies have become more plentiful from their start as participants in a social entrepreneurship program. Nowadays they move around via bicycle in rural Bangladesh after ICT training to help those who do not have regular telecoms access:

They receive specialised training and necessary equipment, and then travel to remote areas by bicycle to personally connect villagers to information and resources the underprivileged need. As many as 24 such info ladies are now working in different villages of Gaibandha, Noakhali and Satkhira districts.

The info lady solution evolved from the original 'Mobile Lady' concept developed by D.Net (Development Research Network) Bangladesh, a non-profit research organisation that champions the use of ICT for the economic development of Bangladesh. Mobile ladies were providing services through cellphones.

The original "mobile lady" concept has since been expanded to a gamut of ICT-related services. The traveling person becomes a "telecenter" in one:

From the key learning from the mobile lady idea, D.Net found some limitations of mobile phone-based services. The technological innovations, like laptop device, helped D.Net find that if a bundle of services are integrated with the mobile lady, she will become a “telecentre” herself. Any one can become an info person, but women are encouraged as they enjoy more privilege than men for entering a house.

Manusher Jonno Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation, has funded the D.Net's Info Lady project. The foundation is an initiative to promote human rights and good governance in Bangladesh. The village information workers, 'mobile ladies', were renamed 'info ladies'. An info lady possesses a laptop or classmate computer, internet modem, headphone, webcam, digital camera, photo printer and a mobile phone for giving the entire livelihood information services at a cheaper rate, and fast.
Help line service, commercial phone service, photography service, livelihood information and knowledge service, international and local voice call service, video and animation service, and internet-based information service are among the services provided by an info lady.

As a practical sort, I wonder why science fiction-inspired schemes by Facebook and Google to use balloons or drones to beam Internet connections gain so much press attention when (a) they do not yet exist and (b) lack realism. Instead of fantasizing about all sorts of gee-whiz ways to connect the world, the traveling infoladies are a much better example to study since (a) they have successfully plied their trade for a number of years now and (b) they would not have been successful if they did not offer services others find useful at a reasonable cost. The transport solution is nothing fancier than a bicycle, but it's proven effective so far.

Attention Facebook and Google: instead of keeping your heads in the cloud (servers?), keep yourselves firmly planted on the ground where the real information dissemination will happen. Bangladesh's infoladies certainly do.

The Chinese government has stepped up efforts to get rid of computer systems from American manufacturers being purchased by domestic firms. You can't say the Yanks did themselves any favors with the Edward Snowden disclosures as accusations of industrial espionage by Chinese firms against US firms were turned around. For a long time, the US has applied racist-protectionist policies against Chinese telecoms equipment, raising barely-credible accusations that the likes of Huawei and ZTE were mere extensions of Chinese government policy.

The targets now are equipment used by financial services industries. Just as in the rest of the world, Chinese banks rely on the so-called "big three" of IBM servers running UNIX, Oracle database systems, and EMC data storage hardware. US spying has given Chinese authorities the excuse to encourage banks to move away from IOE systems:

The movement dates to 2008, when Alibaba’s computer-network department director Wang Jian proposed cutting back on foreign suppliers and replacing their wares with equipment and technology developed almost entirely in-house. 

What Wang wanted to get rid of most was the so-called IOE system, an acronym for an IT network based on the names of three suppliers: IBM, whose servers are packaged with the Unix operating system; Oracle, which supplies database-management systems; and EMC, the maker of data-storage hardware. Wang dubbed his campaign the “De-IOE Movement.” 

Wang decided to revamp Alibaba’s network by replacing its Unix-based servers with less expensive, X86-based PC servers running on the open-source Linux operating system. In such a system, several PCs with X86 microprocessors inside can be linked in a chain to function as a server, replacing a mainframe server. The e-commerce company also built a database management-system of its own with an open-source structure, and started storing data on an internal cloud-storage system. 

The switch to servers made at home has been a slow process for Chinese banks. Ultimately, the banks’ IT experts have been making these decisions, although they’re being encouraged by the government to choose Chinese suppliers, according to a source close to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. The now-famous 2013 revelations involving former U.S. computer-security expert Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on government espionage, gave a boost to proponents of the De-IOE campaign. 

Additional changes will not happen overnight, partly because the IOE companies as well as America’s Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.62%  and Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ +1.09%   offer customers integrated solutions that make it difficult to replace individual pieces of equipment or software. An IT consultant who advises banks said IBM, for example, is so entrenched that China’s banks would likely need about 20 years to replace all IOE systems. 

“Getting rid of IOE means that all of the software must be moved and made compatible to domestic server systems, which seems to be a mission impossible,” said the consultant. Big banks are thus moving cautiously, said the BOC employee, because they want to protect their huge customer and transaction databases. They cannot afford to be hasty because replacing one part of a network can affect others. 

And replacement costs can be astronomical. “The basic technology networks for an IOE system and a ‘De-IOE’ system are totally different,” said another source a state bank. “De-IOE will lead to transforming personnel and management. It’s hard to estimate how high the costs will be.” Ultimately, said the IT consultant, Chinese banks will only manage to kill off IOE systems if products made by Chinese suppliers can provide comparable security and capacity levels, and if the new hardware and software are compatible.

To me it's an entirely avoidable outcome that the Americans brought onto themselves not only by discriminating against Chinese telecoms manufacturers and spying remorselessly on the world's citizens. In the end, you reap what you sow.

Filipino "hackers" are the Amoeba Boys of cyberspace.

 Well this is embarrassing: Having played up the Philippines' emergence as a technology hub in Southeast Asia to rival India, the sheer lameness of its sympathizers' Internet attacks on China is appalling. If you are going to cause mayhem online, then you have to at least target frequently-visited websites. I have long been fascinated with D-I-Y reprisals among netizens through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites, especially those hosted by the offending government. In 2007 I wrote about Russians mounting DDoS attacks against Estonia after the latter relocated a statue commemorating the USSR liberating Tallinn in 1944. Just a few weeks back, I also wrote about how torrent site Rutracker.org fell to Ukrainian DDoS attacks.

The theater of operations here though is the Asia-Pacific region. At the ongoing World Economic Forum in Manila, Vietnamese President Nguyen Tan Dung just met his Filipino counterpart Bnigno Aquino III and both condemned Chinese aggression. You should be aware of what's happening with Vietnam right now, but the Chinese are also agitating the Philippines. PRC flunkies have been busy constructing structures on one of the Spratly Islands it contests with the Philippines, the Johnson South Reef AKA the Philippines' "Mabini Reef" and China's "Yongshu Reef." In either case--parking an oil rig in contested waters (Vietnam) or building on a contested reef (Philippines), the Chinese are violating the 2002 declaration agreed to with ASEAN members it has territorial squabbles with not to escalate matters.

So, what are Filipinos to do other than mount a DDOS attack as sympathetic netizens are supposed to do nowadays? OK, but if you're going to "hurt" China, you might as well take down major sites. How about gov.cn portals, the China Daily or Xinhua for starters? The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems obvious. That will certainly get their attention. To really cripple Chinese commerce, how about hitting business-to-business powerhouses like Alibaba and Baidu? Unfortunately, the list of targeted sites seem to have been chosen to make a mockery of the attackers in being of next to no consequence to Chinese users whatsoever. They even list links to GIFs, fer cryin' out loud. Suffice to say that no Chinese are really being inconvenienced by these pathetic DDoS attacks. As I recall, Taiwan hit Philippine government websites much harder when one of their fishermen was accidentally killed since gov.ph sites were down for the longest time.

These hackers are so lame that I have to lump them with some of the Powerpuff Girls' least threatening "criminal" opponents--if you can call them that--the Amoeba Boys. For those who used to watch those fine cartoons, the "crimes" they committed included snipping off warning tags from mattresses, jaywalking, and other heinous stuff:

With their gangster affectations, these aspiring criminals would love nothing more than to be regarded as serious villains worthy of fighting, and even getting beaten up and sent to jail by the Powerpuff Girls. Unfortunately, their brains are far too primitive to devise a crime above the level of littering or jaywalking.

Attention Philippine "hacktivists": you are the Amoeba Boys of DDoS attacks. The Chinese do not fear you, they are laughing at you. Unless you can actually bring down sites of consequence and cause real disturbances to mainland residents, you are the cyber-equivalent of the Amoeba Boys. It isn't exactly rocket science to find out where to hit them where it hurts if you were really serious about not being laughingstocks.

Ah, fun with Photoshop and someone else's logo.

Something that's piqued my curiosity about the Heartbleed virus which is designed to, well, bleed through security layers is that it's always presented with a catchy logo in the media. Think about it for a moment: why would someone lend a corporate image to a thing as deplorable as a virus? Nobody ever thought of providing a catchy logo for, say, demented livestock for mad cow disease or virus-bestriding poultry for SARS. But there it is again and again for this computer virus: a heart whose edges are bleeding.

As it turns out, this is by design. Codenomicon, an Internet security firm whose services involve testing the robustness of security solutions for online transactions, has been behind it all. Indeed, I wasn't even aware that they've put up a heartbleed.com site describing the security vulnerabilities exploited by this virus. The kicker, though, is of course Codenomicon's freely distributed logo. It's sheer marketing genius! The virus's name matches the logo, and the alarm the firm has raised about the virus surely drives business their way from the street cred gained from discovering it in the first place.

So partly it's Codenomicon making money out of their discovery. Again, there's nothing essentially wrong with that. Yet there's also a public service component in warning the rest of the world about it. How did Codenomicon attract attention to the virus? Through naming and branding, of course:

The Heartbleed flaw is being fixed more quickly because of the decision to give the bug a memorable name and a cute logo, according to the firm that first identified it. The flaw was caused by a simple coding error which resulted in passwords and security credentials being leaked from affected websites. "I really believe that the name and the logo and the website helped fuel the community interest in this," says David Chartier, the CEO of Codenomicon, the security testing firm which found the bug on 3 April.

"The IT community and the press have been important players in getting the word out, and so many people affected have fixed their stuff already," Chartier added. "This went extremely quick, and I think that the fact that it it had a name, had a catchy logo that people remember, really helped fuel the speed with which people became aware of this." Others agree. "The Heartbleed logo is probably one of the highest ROI [return on investment] uses of [approximately] $200 in the history of software security," writes Patrick McKenzie, founder of Kalzumeus Software.

Again, marketing matters:

"Why spend the extra money for a logo? Because it suggests professionalism and dedicated effort, because it will be used exhaustively in media coverage of the vulnerability, because it further deepens the branding association of the vulnerability, the name, the logo, and the canonical web presence, and because it also suggests danger." The logo, as well as the accompanying website which explained in readable English exactly what Heartbleed entailed, were both created in the days between Codenomicon warning authorities of the bug and it being officially patched.

Readers with a background in business management will recognize the use of marketing concepts to encourage prosocial behavior: social marketing. What Codenomicon did was make Heartbleed seem even more of a threat than it may be by promoting awareness of its potentially dire effects, like SARS and MERS rolled into one for natural, not programming, analogies. Here's a short blurb describing social marketing in more detail from a health perspective:

Social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Kotler and Andreasen define social marketing as "differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society." This technique has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for contraceptives and oral rehydration therapy (ORT), and is being used with more frequency in the United States for such diverse topics as drug abuse, heart disease and organ donation.

Like commercial marketing, the primary focus is on the consumer--on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the "marketing mix." This refers to decisions about 1) the conception of a Product, 2) Price, 3) distribution (Place), and 4) Promotion. These are often called the "Four Ps" of marketing...

My takeway? Again, design matters in making your message heard. Hence my recent blog redesign. Perhaps I'd still retain some readers if the IPE Zone looked as amateurish as the Drudge Report, but I sincerely doubt the message would come across.

UPDATE: Eric Levenson of Atlantic's The Wire demurs, however, pointing out that ordinary users did not go out of their way to change passwords despite widespread awareness of this bug. Point taken: I think it's mostly enterprises that reacted.

I likened the NSA to East Germany's notorious secret police the Stasi via a job placement for electro-spooks a few moons ago. Data privacy is very much a hot topic in IPE as to the appropriateness of government spying. The American debate concerns citizens' rights to privacy and their willingness to abrogate them because of purported "security" concerns over terrorism and the like. While I am sure Americans don't particularly care about their spooks spying on foreigners, the issue is even more complicated at the international level. That is, does the American government's utter indifference to privacy concerns when spying on other countries' residents raise global governance concerns?

There are thus two big issues in this respect. First, should the current US-centric architecture continue? Already, plans are afoot to transferring assigned names and numbers away from the American non-profit corporation ICANN. Even if this transfer is done, the question remains of how easy it will be for the NSA to spy on you and me with such great ease. Hence the oft-mooted plans to make the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU) the primary overseer of Internet governance. (Meanwhile, I am amused by American complaints that doing so may result in Internet security concerns when their government's spying animates much of this discussion. The point is that more proactive Internet governance could have made the system more resilient to American intrusion than today's Pincushion 1.0.) Second, should other nations route their Internet traffic away from US hubs and servers to ensure information privacy? I am inclined to think it's a Brazilian/European PR gimmick since the Americans are endlessly resourceful at sticking their noses into everyone else's business.

Speaking of which, I have long been looking for an overview of American spying technologies care of the NSA. The leaks have produced a steady dribble of oddly-named projects: Candygram, Toteghostly, Gopherset, Dropoutjeep, Monkeycalendar. Bruce Schneier has detailed some of these, but there has not been a single, relatively broad overview...until very recently.

Head over to Bloomberg Businessweek for a neat infographic detailing most of the nefarious programs the NSA is running to extract data. Or, at least those which have been uncovered so far. They are in equal parts ingenious and sinister.

It all makes me want to go back to the good old days of fax machines (remember those?) But seriously, consider using analog technologies for transmitting more sensitive information if they prove more resilient to America's vast data tentacles. Make no mistake: having alienated the rest of the world, the US is pretty much alone against everyone else on this matter.

Cybersecurity is not an end unto itself; it is instead an obligation that our governments and societies must take on willingly, to ensure that innovation continues to flourish, drive markets, and improve lives. - Barack Obama [really]

It's been a busy time for followers of Internet governance as Brazil's president and her immediate predecessor unloaded both barrels at the United States' extreme abuse of its dominant position in the World Wide Web's infrastructure. Dilma Rousseff captured global attention not only by snubbing the White House's invitation for a state visit, but more recently by crucifying the double-talking American louse at the United Nations General Assembly.

[I] Here is the key part of her speech where she calls for the much-needed multilateral governance of the Internet to avoid rehashes of Americans spying on world leaders as well as you and me:

The problem, however, goes beyond a bilateral relationship. It affects the international community itself and demands a response from it. Information and telecommunication technologies cannot be the new battlefield between States. [The time] is ripe to create the conditions to prevent cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war, through espionage, sabotage, and attacks against systems and infrastructure of other countries.

The United Nations must play a leading role in the effort to regulate the conduct of States with regard to these technologies. For this reason, Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web.

We need to create multilateral mechanisms for the worldwide network that are capable of ensuring principles such as:

1 – Freedom of expression, privacy of the individual and respect for human rights.
2 – Open, multilateral and democratic governance, carried out with transparency by stimulating collective creativity and the participation of society, Governments and the private sector.
3 – Universality that ensures the social and human development and the construction of inclusive and non-discriminatory societies.
4 – Cultural diversity, without the imposition of beliefs, customs and values.
5 – Neutrality of the network, guided only by technical and ethical criteria, rendering it inadmissible to restrict it for political, commercial, religious or any other purposes.

[II] Less noticed is a recent interview with Hindu News of former Brazilian President Lula. (Alike his country's soccer stars, he seemingly goes by one name.) For better or worse, he and his handpicked successor will forever be entwined alike Putin and Medvedev or Chavez and Maduro. While leaving Rousseff to steal the limelight at the UN, he nevertheless two put in his two cents' worth, as the Yanquis would say:

The U.S. president should apologise to the world for thinking that it can control global communications and ignore the sovereignty of other countries. The U.S. can’t just capture the activities of India, Brazil, China and several other countries. This is very serious. We need to force the United Nations to make a decision on this. Where is the security in the world today, with the U.S. intelligence agency snooping on everything? Where is the confidence in mobile communication or emails? When the NSA revelations came out, the U.S. vice-president (Joe Biden) called Brazil to apologise. It’s not the vice-president who has to apologise, it’s the U.S. president who should apologise to us. What would happen if the U.S. was target of spying? Now, they can steal any information and industrial secrets; they have access to information of our scientists. It means the end of freedom within the territory of a nation state [...]

The independence and economic growth of countries such as India and Brazil seem to bother the U.S, which is now committing a crime against democracy. The argument that they are doing this to take care of the security of other countries is absurd. Nobody asked them to do so. Nobody hired the American espionage system. Democracy is less democratic if one nation has the power to intervene in others. 

Be a man, Barack. Own up to your nation's cowardly actions and welcome those to make Internet governance better reflect its changing user base.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely - Lord Acton

Think of Barack Obama as the cyber-equivalent of Bashar al-Assad. Just as Assad does not own up to his chemical-attacking ways, so does Obama not own up to his Internet-abusing ways. All his pleas for "Internet Freedom" as they turn out, are meant to make it easier to spy on you and me. American digital hypocrites are thick on the ground, and Obama is just another one of their sorry lot. It is digital entrapment plain and simple.

Internationally, the US-centric Internet infrastructure which makes it so very easy for the US government to ask companies to disclose information about their users over alleged (yawn) national security concerns has come under sustained attack in the wake of disclosures that citizens and their leaders the world over have been hit by American snooping. Importantly, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers remains a US-based concern despite being responsible for allowing the Internet to function by maintaining control over IP addresses and suchlike. Given the increasing number of Internet users worldwide, many other countries have become concerned that the Internet's increasingly "global public goods" nature is not matched by changes in governance.

That introduction then brings us to Yanqui snooping: (mostly American) critics make the fallacy that since the strongest proponents of imbuing UN agencies with more voice in Internet governance are purportedly China, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, what they really are after is to improve their ability to wall off their Internet users from the rest of the world. Especially in the wake of disclosures about the extent of US spying, however, there are any number of other nations with legitimate concerns about near-absolute US power over the Internet corrupting absolutely. It is thus fascinating that Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff has been so aggrieved that she put off a state visit to America. What's more, she is urging Brazil to better insulate its telecoms infrastructure from more dastardly Yanqui deeds:

[Brazilian] President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google. The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month's scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner...

While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians' Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping...

There is also a fairly comprehensive set of actions Brazil intends to take to better deal with those Yanqui spies:

Rousseff says she intends to push for international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software during the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month. Among Snowden revelations: the NSA has created backdoors in software and Web-based services.

Brazil is now pushing more aggressively than any other nation to end U.S. commercial hegemony on the Internet. More than 80 percent of online search, for example, is controlled by U.S.-based companies. Most of Brazil's global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff's government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

More communications integrity protection is expected when Telebras, the state-run telecom company, works with partners to oversee the launch in 2016 of Brazil's first communications satellite, for military and public Internet traffic. Brazil's military currently relies on a satellite run by Embratel, which Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim controls. Rousseff is urging Brazil's Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

Internet freedom has become a laughingstock since the most egregious violator of this principle is the United States. If Silicon Valley is hit by commercial fallout over spying, it is well-deserved anyway for meekly playing along with the US government. (Hear that, my blog service provider?) Will the Internet become "Balkanized" or further fragmented as others follow Brazil's example? European governments have been targeted by similar intrusions but do not complain as loudly. OTOH, what benefit do we Internet users gain from the present system which facilitates American intrusion as it abuses its position?

There are legitimate reasons for placing more Internet governance in an international organization contrary to the claim that doing so will simply allow authoritarian regimes to keep better tabs on their citizens. Go ask Brazil. Even if its efforts are for naught as some security experts say, I applaud its courage in raising a question that others have cowered from asking and, better yet, doing something about it. Moreover, I suspect the solution is not for individual countries to try and wall themselves off from the rest of the world but to join nearly-unimpeachable critics of US Internet abuse in asking for basic guarantees concerning security. The pressure being applied at the moment is insufficient, but think of what may occur if millions threaten to flee Facebook, Google, etc. if such concerns remain unaddressed.

In the meantime, do yourselves a favor by not posting sensitive information online. Obama's operatives are definitely watching.

I have become captivated by the twists and turns of the Edward Snowden real-life spy caper. While the original accusation that the US was using its advantageous position in the Internet infrastructure to spy on its own citizens and its allies was expected--absolute power corrupts absolutely--its unfolding implications are far more interesting. Call it Frederick Forsyth...on crack. The IPE implications I've covered in some detail, from Ecuador unilaterally disavowing trade preferences given to it by the US to European lawmakers deliberating on whether to delay the start of EU-US FTA negotiations. The latest word is that EC President Manuel Barroso wants negotiations to occur alongside investigations of American spying. The sideshow is at least as interesting: I enjoy the (calculated) titillation as that master of self-promotion, former Russian spy Anna Chapman, has offered to marry spyboy / boytoy [!?] Edward Snowden and thus grant him rights to remain in Russia.

Back in Latin America, though, we recently had this misadventure of Bolivian President Evo Morales being harassed on his flight home from Russia by European nations France, Italy, Portugal and Spain--allegedly on suspicion that the Latin leftist may have been flying Snowden to Bolivian asylum. Just as spying has created a US-EU row, so too has perceived maltreatment of a Latin leader occasioned (surprise!) yet another continental conflict between the US and the Latin left. Where's Che Guevara when you need him--or Fidel Castro for that matter?

The story above pointed out something I was not previously aware of, though. Did you know that Bolivia expelled the US Agency for International Development (USAID) just last month? Just a short time ago Russia did the same as it was wary of the agency's "democracy promotion" agenda when it ought to have stuck with the task of development instead. Besides, who the heck needs all of that tied aid, anyway? At any rate, different country...same result. From Missus Clinton's favourite media outlet:

Bolivian president Evo Morales has expelled the US development agency from his country for allegedly seeking to undermine his leftist government. Morales claimed on Wednesday that the USAID is involved with "alleged political interference in peasant unions and other social organisations." He made the announcement before a crowd outside the presidential palace during a May Day rally. "Never again, never again USAID, who manipulate and use our leaders, our colleagues with hand-outs," Morales said in announcing the expulsion.

Given the United States' history of interfering in Latin America, you'd think USAID would have been more circumspect about "democracy promotion": fiddling with organized groups and so on. As with many things involving these parties, there is no real moral to the story, US protestations notwithstanding. Americans can be meddlesome hypocrites, while Latin blowhards like Morales blame the Latin left's repeated failures to lift their countries out of poverty on US interference. Same old, same old.

There are no protagonists here, but it does make you wonder if Morales has set himself up for additional harassment by expelling USAID.

It seems the Yanks have gotten themselves into yet another fine mess with their Internet Unfreedom spying activities. [Hello NSA lackeys, I hope you're enjoying yourselves reading this post in between surfing porn sites.] Over the weekend, Der Spiegel added fuel to the fire over the US National Security Agency spying on Internet communications of American friends and foes alike. (Do the Yanks treat them all that differently?) Alike most everyone else, the Germans have come under massive surveillance:

The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.

However, linguistic ties being paramount, there is a set of favoured Anglophone nations who are exempt from a thorough covert investigation from the American spooks:

No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, "The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do."

The allegations right before US-EU FTA are scheduled to start. European responses thus differ based on the amount of spying each nation is purportedly subject to. The French are obviously up in arms over the idea that they should ink a free trade agreement with those stealing sensitive information from Europeans:

The spying allegations come just days before trade negotiations between the U.S. and the EU are scheduled to start on July 8. But [French President Francois] Hollande raised doubts about the talks, saying there should be no negotiations with the U.S. on any matter until it guarantees that it is not spying on its European allies. "We cannot have any negotiations or deals in any domain unless we've gotten these guarantees for France, and that goes for the EU as well," Mr. Hollande said.

However, the Brits who have not been targeted as much are more relaxed about the issue, saying the trade talks should continue anyway according to a UK spokesperson. Still, particularly alarming to the Europeans are claims that spying on the European Council building is widespread and unabated in their own lands:

The EU security experts managed to pinpoint the [spying] line's exact location -- a building complex separated from the rest of the headquarters. From the street, it looks like a flat-roofed building with a brick facade and a large antenna on top. The structure is separated from the street by a high fence and a privacy shield, with security cameras placed all around. NATO telecommunications experts -- and a whole troop of NSA agents -- work inside. Within the intelligence community, this place is known as a sort of European headquarters for the NSA.

A review of calls made to the remote servicing line showed that it was reached several times from exactly this NATO complex -- with potentially serious consequences. Every EU member state has rooms at the Justus Lipsius building for use by ministers, complete with telephone and Internet connections.

Ultimately, if serious objections are raised to the US-EU FTA over American espionage, they will likely come from the European Parliament instead of the European Council despite the latter coming under more direct American data attacks. Post-Lisbon Agenda, the European Parliament has expanded powers to turn down free trade deals--especially over human rights violations such as violating the privacy of Europeans. While the Americans can probably gain the acquiescence of European leaders through the time-tested way of buying them off in any number of ways, such a trick is harder to do with the more heterogeneous and newly assertive European Parliament given its increased discretion.

The EU Parliament used to be pretty lame, but it has since gained authority in certain respects. Unfortunately for the Yanks, these include again basing FTAs on human rights criteria. Martin Schulz, the current [German Social Democrat] president of that body, is certainly annoyed by the spying:

The head of the European Parliament has demanded that the United States provide full clarification over a report disclosed by American whistleblower Edward Snowden alleging that Washington spied on EU offices. Martin Schulz said on Saturday that the revelation would have severe impacts on the ties between the EU and the US if proven true.  

“On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations,” Schulz stated.

At the very least, expect greater European Parliament scrutiny of these so-called "friends" of theirs in trade negotiations. After all, with lying and spying friends like the US, who needs enemies? 

UPDATE: France is suggesting that the US be given a "time out" by delaying US-EU FTA negotiations by two weeks. However, the European Commission does not agree. As I said earlier, the most likely source of disapproval will come from the European Parliament. That will happen later on assuming that the US and EU come up with something they believe domestic audiences shall sign up to.

It's probably not the wisest thing to do, but at least Ecuador may be accepting the consequences of putting its foot in its mouth. Famously harbouring WikiLeaks' Julian Assange in its London embassy, it appears ready to up the stakes in testing America's (quite frankly idiotic) "Internet Freedom" concept by also harbouring former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He famously leaked documents showing massive data gathering on Internet users on behalf of the US government and is under a global interdict from US authorities.

While this erstwhile hero to the nerdcore set has been sitting around in a Moscow airport waiting for a flight to Ecuador, a US senator threatened to remove American trade preferences granted to Andean nations:

The head of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Wednesday he would seek to end preferential treatment for Ecuadorean goods if the South American nation offers political asylum to fugitive former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Senator Robert Menendez [D-New Jersey], chairman of the foreign relations panel, warned in a statement that accepting Snowden "would severely jeopardize" preferential trade access the United States provides to Ecuador under two programs that are up for renewal in Congress. Our government will not reward countries for bad behavior," Menendez said.

The trade preferences, by the way, are a continuation of a 1991 pact (the Andean Trade Preference Act) wherein the US granted Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru improved access to the American market in exchange for better cooperation fighting drug production. In Iran-Contra lingo, it was a "trade for drugs" deal. As it turns out, it needs to be renewed every two years by lawmakers, thus occasioning Menendez's threat of non-renewal the next time around. Given its meagre trade, Ecuador benefited from this trade benefit with the US significantly as demonstrated by lobbying quite hard to continue it despite a steady stream of anti-American rhetoric. Really, Correa, like his purported opponents, is quite the hypocrite.

But I suppose things may have changed and Latin brio has overcome common sense: Ecuador's government has recently said, "go ahead, make my day":

Ecuador's leftist government thumbed its nose at Washington on Thursday by renouncing U.S. trade benefits and offering to pay for human rights training in America in response to pressure over asylum for former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The angry response threatens a showdown between the two nations over Snowden, and may burnish President Rafael Correa's credentials to be the continent's principal challenger of U.S. power after the death of Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

"Ecuador will not accept pressures or threats from anyone, and it does not traffic in its values or allow them to be subjugated to mercantile interests," government spokesman Fernando Alvarado said at a news conference.

I especially like the part about how Ecuador will gladly pay for the human rights training of Americans who keep yakking about them while acting in...let's just say inconsistent ways:

In a cheeky jab at the U.S. spying program that Snowden unveiled through leaks to the media, the South American nation offered $23 million per year to finance human rights training.

The funding would be destined to help "avoid violations of privacy, torture and other actions that are denigrating to humanity," Alvarado said. He said the amount was the equivalent of what Ecuador gained each year from the trade benefits.

The Latin Left is alive and well. If it weren't, then nobody would be making PR stunts of this nature to contest the seat vacated by the late Hugo Chavez. That said, let's just say that Ecuador has some way to go before topping Chavez's stunt of subsidizing heating oil purchases of poor Americans via the CITGO subsidiary of state-owned firm PVDSA.

Meanwhile, like his immediate predecessor, Obama should just shut the hell up and think before making more retarded statements about "Internet freedom" and so on if his government is always so hellbent on prosecuting these evildoers. Making folk heroes out of ninnies is a quintessentially American government pastime. This guy isn't even on Ecuadorean soil, fer cryin' out loud.

UPDATE: Note that the US has already cut Andean Trade Preference Act benefits with Bolivia, another repeat transgressor of the Will of America. However, Bolivia's case was over its nonchalance in combating drug production there whereas Ecuador's concerns...unusual and unrelated things.

This post will be brief: I have identified the several contradictions of Hillary Clinton's hoary notion of "Internet Freedom" in a previous co-authored essay. Mind you, that bit of writing even preceded the WikiLeaks dustup which permanently consigned that bit of digital exceptionalism to the scrap heap of computer history.

More recently, American lawmakers have forwarded bits of legislation in the House and Senate designed to protect intellectual property rights by strongly obliging Internet service providers (ISPs) to monitor their customers for piracy. It seems even American tech firms recognize this sort of inconsistency regarding Uncle Sam's treatment of the Internet when it comes to addressing the rights of commercial rights holders (not predominantly theirs, mind you) vis-a-vis those of regular folks without such commercial clout. Certainly the likes of Wikimedia Foundation and Google of "Enabling Trade in the Era of Information Technologies: Breaking Down Barriers to the Free Flow of Information" fame are up in arms against this latest intrusion. Wikipedia is even blacked out today.

Why should being unable to pirate the latest episode of Gossip Girl be a more important global priority than, say, respecting other nations' rights to non-interference and non-intervention and hence keep the interstate system--in reasonably decent operation since 1648--intact? Not only do some folks have unworkable ideas but also a highly distorted set of priorities.

UPDATE: And don't forget this bit of proposed American legislation is but the tip of the iceberg. Actually, the Obama administration is very much behind the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act (ACTA)--a nasty piece of work masquerading as a trade agreement with provisions not unlike those of PIPA and SOPA with farther-reaching potential.

The self-styled American digerati has me ROFL even more now with their belief about the central importance of digital media in the Arab Spring events. A few days ago, we gathered that Egypt was in many ways worse off economically now than under President Mubarak. For, without a figure to provide basic law and order, the result would be what it is at present-chaotic. From today's headlines, we now gather that they're back in Tahrir Square. With civilians getting shot once more, we've seen this movie before.

So far, what can we reasonably deduce?

1. Digital technologies are mere communication tools, not instruments for lasting change or even "revolution" as some hype it to be;
2. Mob rule with people taking to the streets time and again is still mob rule even when using Twitter etc. to gather. It's inimical to establishing order;
   
3. Hence, exporting these technologies in the belief that it would promote freedom and economic growth is far-fetched. Take Egypt with its resulting reversion to military rule, endless protests and continuous credit downgrades;
4. Insofar as we haven't yet left the Westphalian system as far as I can tell, states should be left alone to determine their policies regarding these technologies--just as the United States is busy trying to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for leaking US diplomatic cables;
5. Fair is fair: China should be left alone as unpalatable as its policies towards the Internet may be to some white people. National laws regarding non-intervention and non-interference with regard to media--whether they be those of the US or China--still have validity in a bordered world.

It's long overdue to consign the hypocritical, incredulous notion of "Internet freedom" to the dustbin of similarly awful American wheeze alike the "strong dollar" policy and the "Washington Consensus."

[NOTE: This is the first of two China and authoritarian development posts.] In case you missed it, you should really get a hold of this. For some time, I've been fascinated with shoe throwing as a form of political protest [1, 2] and the lengths the PRC leadership goes through to maintain the Great Firewall of China (GFW)[1, 2]. So, it was inevitable that I would be most interested in the news that Fang Binxing--recognized as the architect of the aforementioned Internet censorship infrastructure--was pelted with eggs and shoes by a yet-unidentified protester:

Police in China say they are seeking a man who allegedly threw an egg and shoes at the designer of the country's Great Firewall of web controls. Fang Binxing was lecturing at Wuhan University, Hubei province, when the alleged protest took place. Reports of the attack spread quickly on Twitter after a user named Hanunyi posted his account of the incident.

Mr Fang is reviled by many Chinese web users for overseeing development of China's system of internet censorship. The computer scientist, who is Principal of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, has been dubbed the Father of the Great Firewall.

Alas for his critics, alike George W. Bush, Mr. Fang was reportedly quite nimble in dodging incoming projectiles:

An officer at Luojiashan Public Security Bureau confirmed police were investigating the alleged attack, AP news agency reported. Protester covers mouth Protesters accuse China's government of stifling its critics and restricting freedom of speech

Hanunyi posted a live account of the alleged shoe-throw on his profile page, including a picture of a hand clutching an egg. "The egg missed the target. The first shoe hit the target. The second shoe was blocked by a man and a woman," he tweeted.

The Great Firewall, also known as the Golden Shield Project, blocks thousands of websites, including those linked to the Dalai Lama and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. It also filters keyword searches for sensitive topics such as Tibet or Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel prize-winning dissident.

According to some Twitter users, searches for "hanunyi" have also been blocked since the alleged attack on Mr Fang took place. China's government has invested heavily in controlling the internet, recently setting up a body to monitor censorship: the State Internet Information Office.

I myself have some questions. For instance, what was this guy lecturing about? Automatically filtering pornographic content by checking the amount of skin tone present in images? Certainly, this guy was never meant for public consumption. Yet as I always like to say, boys and girls, you're nobody in this world until people start throwing shoes at you (and maybe eggs too, for that matter). Dubya, Wen Jiabao...it's pretty rarefied company ;-)

I can hardly believe that this is my third post on WikiLeaks. After cataloguing typical American double-speak on "Internet freedom" (whatever that is) and suggesting that WikiLeaks move to Montenegro if survival is its goal, we now have two interesting entries.

First, I have in the past featured the highly controversial activities of Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria. To say that its activities in the Niger Delta and relationship with the Ogoni tribe are controversial is to put things mildly. Now we have these cables in which American officials claim that a Shell executive boasted of infiltrating the Nigerian government. From WikiLeaks' media partner The Guardian:

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington's embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

There's another story that caught my eye. I have never been much of a fan of Venezuela's so-called Bolivarian Revolution insofar as it has done rather worse by its people in the aftermath of expropriating several Western oil companies. If you kick the foreigners out, I'd be a heck of a lot more impressed if you could at least sustain output at pre-nationalization levels. Let's just say Hugo Chavez hasn't achieved this feat. Talk about ideology trumping reality. Worse, for lack of technical expertise, it's said that he's asking same Western companies he kicked out to come back on terms more favourable to them. Not very impressive; Simon Bolivar probably wouldn't approve:

Venezuela's tottering economy is forcing Hugo Chávez to make deals with foreign corporations to save his socialist revolution from going broke. The Venezuelan president has courted European, American and Asian companies in behind-the-scenes negotiations that highlight a severe financial crunch in his government. Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is the engine of the economy but buckled when given an ultimatum by its Italian counterpart and has scrambled to attract foreign partners, according to confidential US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

The memos depict an unfolding economic fiasco and suggest some of Chávez's key allies – Argentina, Brazil and Cuba – are gravely concerned at Venezuela's direction. "President Chávez, for his part, is acutely aware of the impact the country's general economic trajectory has had on his popularity," says one cable...

However, in separate private conversations with the [American] ambassador, Patrick Duddy, industry figures detailed the parlous state of the industry. A senior manager from Chevron estimated the state oil company's output at 2.1m to 2.3m barrels per day, well below official declarations of 3.3m.

And then there's the humiliation of Hugo as he calls back the conquistadores:

Italy's ambassador to Caracas, Luigi Maccotta, told his US counterpart that [national] Italian oil company ENI squeezed PDVSA over an Orinoco belt deal in January this year knowing it had no one else to turn to. The Italians delayed the signing by two days to reinforce the Venezuelan government's "need for ENI". Paolo Scaroni, the company's CEO, then faced down Venezuela's oil minister, Rafael Ramirez, over changes to terms and conditions.

"Thirty minutes before the ceremony was supposed to begin Scaroni told Ramirez: 'Take it or leave it, I can get on my plane and move on.' Ramirez apparently used that half an hour to convince President Chávez to accept all of ENI's proposed changes or risk losing the deal," according to the US cable. The Italians said they would not pay PDVSA a standard signing bonus because the company already owed them $1bn.

Colour me unimpressed, Hugo.

Whatever you may think of Julian Assange's now world-famous leaks, you have to wonder about his follow-through. Having plied a cache of cables from the world's most formidable foreign service, he's had a more challenging time keeping his leaks online. As we keep reading nowadays, Amazon decided to discontinue hosting WikiLeaks (allegedly under duress). Meanwhile, the cash flow to Julian Assange & Co. has also been severed as PayPal has similarly cut off handling donations to this "illegal" operation.

So having done the hard work of acquiring American secrets, it is thus puzzling to me why he's not thought of keeping his online renegade activities afloat. Odd? Yes, of course. Puzzlingly enough, Assange hasn't observed the tactics of those who've been in American crosshairs for a much longer period of time--Internet software piracy sites. As if on cue, the world's top private tracker site, Demonoid, has moved its registration to--get this--Montenegro

Earlier this week Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had seized some 82 domain names as part of its ongoing “Operation In Our Sites” and already one site, Demonoid.com, is trying to stay one step ahead of the game by migrating its site to a new address. “We are in the process of migrating the site to our new address, Demonoid.ME,” says the BitTorrent tracker site.

When it comes to foreign sites the US govt can only seize the domain name pointers of domains under its jurisdiction. This includes those top-level domains administered by Verisign, and thus ICANN [like .COM].

Though no torrent tracker-hosting sites have been targeted thus far, the latest round of “Operation In Our Sites” did ensnare the BitTorrent tracker search engine Torrent-finder.com. If ICE can seize the domain name of site that doesn’t even host torrent trackers then surely it could one that actually does.

Demonoid.com is simply trying to stay one step ahead of the game by registering the site with .me, the top-level domain for the tiny country of Montenegro. It’s another in a long series of tug wars between govt and technology, despite the fact that the latter is always guaranteed victory in the end.

Well of course this writeup views Demonoid's actions favourably since it's called, erm, ZeroPaid. In any event, the Yanqui cybercops at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have triggered a backlash among the money-for-nothing online crowd with its "Operation in Our Sites" (v. 2.0, mind you) that targets those selling pirated merchandise:

Seizure orders have been executed against 82 domain names of commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works as part of Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0, as part of an ongoing investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

"The sale of counterfeit U.S. brands on the Internet steals the creative work of others, costs our economy jobs and revenue and can threaten the health and safety of American consumers," said ICE Director John Morton. "The protection of intellectual property is a top priority for Homeland Security Investigations and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. We are dedicated to protecting the jobs, the income and the tax revenue that disappear when counterfeit goods are trafficked."

Unlike the hostage-to-events WikiLeaks, however, it seems the other torrent sites have drawn the connection: if the US is seizing domains of those selling pirated goods, it won't be long before it does the same to intellectual piracy transgressors. Hence, the exodus out of .COM to places like .ME Montenegro is well underway:

A sort of mass-exodus from US-controlled .COM domains is taking place, with dozens of sites registering alternate domains in nations where chances of persecution for association with copyright infringing activities is slim. This action has been sparked by the domain seizures in the United States, performed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that occurred just a week ago. Site owners are choosing domains which are controlled by nations that either don’t have strict copyright laws, or even locations that do have the laws but lack the resources to enforce them.

Demonoid, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, chose to leave their .COM domain behind completely in favor of a .ME domain operated by the nation of Montenegro. Others are, ironically, leaving the US, supposedly the “Land of the Free,” for China, a country well-known for their rampant censorship.

Gary Fung, owner of BitTorrent engine Isohunt, is based in Canada, however his own run-ins with the American film industry has driven him to reserve a backup .HK domain in case the US government decides to seize his .COM. “Countries like China censor for political reason, US with COICA will censor for copyright and commercial reason,” Fung told TorrentFreak. “It’ll be a chilling parallel put into serious question how the US should still be in charge of the much of the internet infrastructure like the root DNS, or how US can continue to claim as the model example for free-speaking democracy.”

Site owners like Fung are most concerned about the rationale behind the US domain seizures. Torrent-Finder.com, similar in function to Fung’s Isohunt, was targeted simply because they ended up on the MPAA and RIAA lists of “notorious markets” of copyright infringing material.

“For RIAA, MPAA’s slandering of us as rogue websites, it’s political PR and lobbying that has no basis in reality and ignorable,” Fung says. “Perhaps they should be educated in the many non-infringing uses of BitTorrent and P2P, or they risk listing every social media and sharing website as rogue.” Unless something changes for the better, Fung will be keeping his .HK domain in case his site is one of the next to be targeted by US government raids. And he’ll be joined by many others in that regard. Yes, site owners are leaving the United States in favor of China because they’ll have more freedom and less chance of persecution. How incredibly unbelievable and sad.

Seen any torrent trackers heading to Switzerland, Assange? What the heck he's doing mucking about in the likes of Switzerland flat out befuddles me. Take a hint from the pros, Assange, and hie thee to Montenegro if you want to escape this American dragnet:

Whistleblowing organisation WikiLeaks has moved its website to Switzerland as it struggled to remain open in the face of official and corporate moves to cut its access to the internet. And there was speculation that an arrest of the site's founder Julian Assange might be imminent, after Swedish authorities refiled an international warrant with additional information requested by the Metropolitan Police...

The website moved to the Swiss address wikileaks.ch after the American company providing its domain name, EveryDNS.net, cut off service because cyber attacks were threatening the rest of its network. WikiLeaks had turned to EveryDNS and servers in Europe after Amazon stopped hosting the site on Thursday. Meanwhile, reports suggested that authorities in Paris were trying to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information.

It's interesting times for America's cyber-foes. Things will become doubly interesting if and when the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) becomes law Stateside. Undoubtedly, the US remains the 500-pound gorilla in cyberspace.

Face it: we all have issues. However, it seems Missus Clinton's foibles are more high-profile than those of the rest of us. Here's yet another case in point. Just a few months removed from making a grandiose speech on the virtues of "Internet freedom" [picture above] in the wake of those dastardly Chinese clamping down on Google's violation of Chinese censorship laws, there's now apparently an Americans exception reserved for WikiLeaks. Unless you've been hiding in a cave somewhere between the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, there has been a media firestorm over the leakage of an interesting set of State Department communications to major international newspapers like the New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. Unfortunately, the ol' freedom 'n' democracy shtick is being contextually applied. If it's America's erstwhile rivals, the problem is one of dealing with "government censors." When it comes to the US government being at the receiving end of some "Internet freedom," however, it becomes an "illegal act" according to the secretary of state. Compare:

Hillary "Internet Freedom" Clinton (January 21, 2010): Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world. And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.

Hillary "Stealing Classified Documents" Clinton (November 29, 2010): The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems. This Administration is advancing a robust foreign policy that is focused on advancing America’s national interests and leading the world in solving the most complex challenges of our time, from fixing the global economy, to thwarting international terrorism, to stopping the spread of catastrophic weapons, to advancing human rights and universal values. In every country and in every region of the world, we are working with partners to pursue these aims.

My, my, such legalistic verbiage. It sounds awfully familiar. Where have I heard such language before? Why, it's those famous Internet freedom violators the Chinese who've said similar things in their white paper on the Internet (Google, take note):

China adheres to rational and scientific law-making, and reserves space for Internet development. Relevant laws and regulations pertaining to basic Internet resource management, information transmission regulation, information security guarantee and other key aspects define the responsibilities and obligations of basic telecommunication business operators, Internet access service providers, Internet information service providers, government administrative organs, Internet users and other related bodies. The citizens' freedom and privacy of correspondence is protected by law, which stipulates at the same time that while exercising such freedom and rights, citizens are not allowed to infringe upon state, social and collective interests or the legitimate freedom and rights of other citizens. No organization or individual may utilize telecommunication networks to engage in activities that jeopardize state security, the public interest or the legitimate rights and interests of other people.

Oops, there went the digital exceptionalism bit. In the end, the US, China, and the rest are all on the same boat in citing similar reasons for curtailing unfettered Internet freedom. Further recall what Missus Clinton said in her bid for Internet freedom that seem strange in light on current US actions:

Hillary "Internet Freedom" Clinton (January 21, 2010): On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

The main points are these -

1. Whatever your opinion of WikiLeaks' actions as well as those of the US government in response, the idea that all of us netizens should have "equal access" to knowledge and ideas doesn't quite hold when it's the US having a taste of "Internet freedom";
2. The US still wants to exercise its sovereignty, as do the likes of China and other purported enemies of digital democracy. Accordingly, this demonstrates that most countries--including the United States--do feel obliged to rein in the supposedly extraterritorial "single Internet" features of the Internet if it so suits their purposes;
3. Similarly, the United States is citing its laws to enforce its will on foreign entities--sort of like Google in China, huh? As long as there is no clear global "Law of the Internet"--Google may want to change that (foolishly, I believe)--I guess we all must return to national law.

Channelling Daniel Drezner, then, I agree that there is no real hypocrisy being revealed by the difference between what America says during diplomatic discourse and its internal communications reveal as the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggests. Rather, the hypocrisy lies in the very notion of Internet freedom. When other countries (especially those unfriendly to America) perform cyber-censure by claiming to apply law, it's a violation of free speech. When the US attempts to do the same, it's an "illegal" act that must be brought to justice. The Chinese didn't even allude to throwing Google personnel in jail. Who's paranoid here?

The excuse that American personnel and informants are being put in danger doesn't wash, either. As Evgeny Morozov points out, cyber-dissidents supposedly empowered by "Internet freedom" face these dangers already [1, 2] instead of facing those which are more abstract at this point in time.

Ah well, you know ol' Missus Clinton. Let's just say that she's prone to using, how should I describe it, grandiose language. We all remember that chestnut of a quote while she was first lady, "This vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President." Nowadays we have a cyber-update of the same sentiment. With some American dirty laundry being aired out in public, "this disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community – the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations, that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity." In the end, the only clear result of this exercise may be the State department exercising more circumspection in its intra-agency communications since, embarrassingly enough, there is apparently a culture of leaking there. It's not quite a tight ship. Telling others to be guarded in their communications with Americans is nothing novel, obviously.

I guess what goes around comes around। It makes you wish Missus Clinton didn't start fooling around with "Internet freedom" since everybody knows who the joke is on this time. You can carve that in 50 tons of Tennessee marble.

UPDATE: Also see the State Department's letter to Julian Assange prior to the release of the cables. Same legalese banana.