Wired State

DMCA Takedown Notice of Copyright Infringement to John Young

February 17, 2014


Cryptome Administrator: John Young
John Young, Cryptome Administrator
[email protected]
tel: 212-873-8700
251 West 89th Street,
New York, NY 10024


Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement

Attn:  John Young, Cryptome Administrator

This notice complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3))

I, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, swear under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on my own behalf as the Rights Owner for the copyrighted works listed below.

It has come to my attention that your website cryptome.org  (205.178.145.72)  is engaged in the electronic distribution of copies of my works and that your account @cryptomeorg is linking to these works. It is my good faith belief that the use of these works in this manner is not authorized by myself, the copyright owner, or any agent or the law.  This is in clear violation of United States, European Union, and International copyright law.

You must expeditiously remove this material from the website cryptome.org or block or disable access to it, as required under both US and EU law.

The works are listed below:

Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack

Published by me at, among other locations:

http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Not-Thee-Invincible-Transparency-ebook/dp/B00I2CJKI6

The URLs to identify the infringing files and the means to locate them on your website are listed below.

http://cryptome.org/2014/02/fitzpatrick-snowden-01.pdf
http://cryptome.org/2014/02/fitzpatrick-snowden-10.pdf

I believe in good faith that use of the aforementioned material is not authorized by me, the copyright owner, any agents, or the law.

The information in this notice is accurate and true to the best of my knowledge.

You must expeditiously remove or block or disable access to all the infringing material.

Publication of DMCA notices and copyright owner’s address is not required by you in order to comply with the law.

The next letter will be from counsel.

/Catherine A. Fitzpatrick/
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

[address]
 

"Burning Down the House"

Remember this? It's all of Lawrence Lessig's friends lip-syncing "Same as it Ever Was" by David Byrne in a birthday tribute. It's a video posted on line -- do you think they paid Byrne a license to use that song? Of course not! This screenshot is take from the video, and it's of Aaron Swartz, who was one of Lessig's admirers and lip-synced the song...

So David Byrne is whining at the Guardian - the Internet will suck all creative content out of the world.

My reply:

David Byrne seems to have forgotten why the streaming model emerged in the first place -- because the copyleftists refused to accept the model of paid content.

They say "information wants to be free" and classify any coded artifact as "information" that "wants" to be free even if the musician also "wants to get paid" for his product. That he is left the digital original after it is copied over and over is small compensation when the commodification of his work is not possible so that he can *make a living*.

The Pirate Party types think this is all just fine, along with Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who claims if you give away your works you still make money. Of course *he* does, by giving lectures and writing articles about how....if you give away your stuff you will still get paid. All nonsense.

This model emerged because the original geeks making the Internet had to hide the great costs of themselves and their machines. They had to make newspapers be free as a loss leader to cover that fact up. Tim Berners-Lee deliberately welded freeness and lack of privacy into the Internet. Indeed, you can't have privacy until you concede private property. All of these things go together.

Right-click and pay to get content, that's how it has to be. We have an Internet generation of pirates and shoplifters bolstered by professors pushing the copyleftist line and Big IT cynically promoting the California Business Model, which encourages social media where people upload first, then ask questions later about who the rights belong to -- and those people have to chase platforms with DMCA takedown notices, all the while companies like Google laugh as they pocket revenue from click ads against the content.

This is going to change, and already is changing with HTML5's latest iteration having DRM. Good! And there will be more. People buy i-tune and pay for the New York Times. And will go on doing so.

All Byrne is doing here is trying to take the Internet mobs antagonistic to the mob and gear them toward hating evil middle-men record companies again who stream. But the reality is, he has to instead become a moral voice gearing people toward paying period. They will have to pay more for streaming. They will have to pay more on demand. It's worth it. Otherwise we will be burning down the house.

Follow the discussion here.

Related articles

David Byrne On Web Streaming

David Byrne Thinks The Internet Will Kill Creative Content

Why WikiLeaks is No Different than the NSA (Only Worse) -- and Snowden's Snow Job

Film by Laura Poitras. A rare moment when poker-faced sober-sides Snowden smiles in the film, when asked if he had in fact planned to burrow into the NSA as a mole via his job at Booz, Hamilton Allen.

I've been a long-time critic of Tor, going back to 2009 and earlier even before I heard of WikiLeaks and its use and championing of Tor. I've criticized Tor and its government origins and its evolution in the hand of unaccountable coders (and the arrogant and ethics-free coders are both inside and outside of government, and that's why the phenomena of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden happens).

You can read my back pieces here (on Jacob Appelbaum's assistance to WikiLeaks in shameful propagandizing); on the murky business of Tor, the Navy, the State Department, and Jacob Appelbaum (who was once a grantee of the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, but who wound up being wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury); on Appelbaum's shameless bashing of his rivals in the granting process; on Appelbaum's paranoic and rabid pursuit of the NSA even before the Snowden affair, calling for sabotage of the NSA's cables; on his shameful display at a public meeting at Open Society Institute where he heckled an FBI agent saying he could hack her phone; and recently on his strange contradictions regarding the Snowden story;  and his admission that the data trail places him in Hawaii with Snowden at the same time in April 2013, earlier than he originally claimed -- and that perhaps he's the "suspected hacker" in Snowden's story of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend".

THE TROUBLE WITH TOR AND JACOB APPELBAUM

Even back in Second Life, when I first began strenuously debating Shava Nerad (whom I came to call "the Tor crone" for her vicious defense of Tor and attacks on me), I had heard from some ethical coders that Tor had a bad reputation because its people had taken advantage of its users and sniffed the packets of Chinese dissidents.  That seemed pretty sleazy, but par for the course in the world of arrogant nihilist hackers with which I first became acquainted with in 1999 in the Sims Online beta, and then observed more closely later in the early days of Second Life in 2004, where I found the first versions of Anonymous harassing critics of their vigilantism like me, and planning their attacks on Scientology even before they surfaced in real life.

THE SOFTWARE AUTOCRACY

I spent a lot of time blogging about the Software Autocracy for years then because I found these people really menacing and disturbing, and the implications of how they would abrogate all our rights through our increasing dependency on their coded artifacts a real concern. I had no idea that some of these people I met in Second Life would actually end up advising the president of the United States in real life (Lawrence Lessig); that they would even be in office in the White House and have influence over Congress (Beth Noveck -- who is out of office now but continues to have deep influence). I could never have dreamed that the people like Julian Assange or Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, of the hacker types that I encountered in Second Life all the time crashing my Sims, or trying to throw the devs in the early days of Twitter, would wind up wrecking havoc in real life; that the prototyped incidents I saw of document hacking and privacy hacking and destabilization of authority in Second Life would have their real-life counterparts in the hacks of Cablegate, Stratfor, Sony, the Pentagon, the CIA, and now the NSA (with one infamous hacker, Barrett Brown even connected both the Second Life and real life).

WIKILEAKS HAPPENED DUE TO WIKIFICATION OF GOVERNMENT

These people are all part of a movement; they are all part of a continuum; they are all in a tribe or network. WikiLeaks couldn't happen unless first, a group of arrogant hackers in government, and their academic and corporate counterparts began having Wikipedia weekend seminars and wound up wikifying the entire US government, to its doom. (And what has to be understood about this isn't just some literal wiki with some mundane useful stuff on it, but the mentality of the software autocrats). Snowden's hack could happen if it weren't for the casual arrogance and neglect and even sabotage with which most systems analysts and programmers and coders do their work in government and outside in contractors.

DEFCON

Some people think that the message about the ethics-free nihilist hackers inside and out of government, inside and out of corporations, is that this persona, especially its most remedy-resistant forms, is the problem -- male machismo, if you will, and the arrogance of the Anonymous hacker heckling and doxing someone is no different than the arrogant NSA analyst who spies on people and pulls their files.

And that's true enough, although not a complete description of the problem. But let's look at it in this most basic form first. DefCon is one of the places where that is on display. I remember a friend of mine went to DefCon in the year that HPGary was hacked by Anonymous and the government's efforts to try to do something to combat Anonymous, and combat the destructiveness of Glen Greenwald, the activist lawyer-blogger and ardent hacker supporter, ultimately blew up in their faces (unless it was a sting?). This friend -- with deep concerns about unethical hackers -- felt that HPGary and Anonymous were no different in their nasty methods and their dubious methods like creation of personas on line to fool the public. DefCon was always one of those conference watering holes where spooks and contractors and script kiddies in mom's basement would all mingle and exchange shop talk, because ultimately, their tribe is where their loyalties lay, and not their various affiliations -- which are fungible as they are bid out and bought by the highest bidder constantly among the Big IT firms, all of which have a revolving door into government.

Then recently, one DefCon organizer announced that NSA was not welcome this year (they had come covertly, or semi-covertly in the past, and many people found it titilating and it added to the enjoyment for some of the civilian hackers). Interestingly, at Ars Technica, one of the top nerd forums, a contributor in the forums under this piece objected to the undemocratic way in which this announcement was made, as he didn't agree that NSA should be blocked from the conference. I wonder how that will pan out.

In any event, while Jacob Appelbaum goes to great lengths in his Chaos Communications Club speech in December 2012 to define a dividing line between the "unethical" hackers inside government who have "gone to the dark side," and himself and his friend whom he believes are the "ethical" ones on the "light side" (it's actually just the opposite), if you look at how WikiLeaks and Appelbaum's role in it evolved, you would have to conclude that WikiLeaks is really no different than the NSA in its philosophy of "collect 'em all".

THE ORIGINS OF WIKILEAKS IS A BIG DATA HACK

Just as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which many perceive as some bastion of free speech and online freedom actually got its start in legal defense and edgecasing and lawfaring for phreakers (phone exploiters) and hackers facing criminal charges -- i.e. originated in criminality -- so did WikiLeaks.

I've been reading the book by Luke Harding (who is also a great reporter on Russia) and David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. This book came out in 2012 and I meant to get it but it slipped my mind with everything else -- and now I see it's a must buy.

The authors describe Tor:

Tor introduces an uncrackable level of obfuscation. Say Appelbaum in Seattle wants to send a message to Domscheit-Berg in Berlin. Both men need to run the tor program on their machines. Appelbaum might take the precaution of encrypting it first using the free-of-charge PGP system.

They then describe the "onion-layer" mode of encryption which you can read about on Wikipedia or Tor's site or other locations -- basically, to simply if it, by splitting up packets of data and spreading them over nodes, no one person accessing the system can see the whole story and therefore obfuscation encrypts your communications. But the people with the top-level view of the system who know where the nodes are or who can access the end points can snoop on you.  And of course, as ethics-free hackers with a sense that they are right and everyone else is wrong, they do so with no sense of shame and even with a sense of entitlement -- you know, just the way they claim US government agents do. And if we were ever to submit to the encryption regime that the crypto kiddies like Jacob Appelbaum and their enablers like Rebecca McKinnon envision, we'd merely have them as the coders in charge with the top-down system-wide view, with far less checks and balances than the NSA (which is why I chose the NSA over them any day).

We knew this story of the unethical origins of WikiLeaks, but Harding and Leigh in fact have pulled it all together very coherently so you can really see it starkly:

"Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange told Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker associate. But Tor has an interesting weakness. If a message isn't specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 -- not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words:  eavesdropping.

On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excited messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from:

"Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We're going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa associations and...russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowning. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1TB [one terrabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes]."

A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstand, told Wired  magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest documents, email contents, user names and passwords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node.  This was the final server at the end of the Tor system through which documents without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstand "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the INdian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out."

The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The New Yorker staffer wrote:  "One of the WikiLeaks activists owend a server that was being used as a node for the tor network. Millions of secret trnasmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers form China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction h as ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and Assange wa able to say, "We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China."

The authors then proceed to describe how WikiLeaks also grew out of the anti-capitalist radicals movements and a WikiLeaks stall was first set up at the World Social Forum in 2007 -- as I said -- must read!

Now, what can we draw from this? Yes, that WikiLeaks is just like the NSA. Or rather, just like the way they claim that NSA is.

The Creative Commons Shill

Larry Lessig 50th Birthday Lip Sync Tribute from Daniel Jones on Vimeo. This video illustrates many famous goofs and and lesser-knowns who have endorsed Lessig's loopy technocommunist ideals starting with Joi Ito, venture communist. Only the children can be forgiven. Featuring Ethan Zuckerman telling us there is water at the bottom of the ocea. See Aaron Swartz at 2:38. This video has a CC license. I am using it because I can as an illustration to a critical post.

 

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Ever since I started this blog 2.5 years ago, I've been waiting for three things that might happen because of my persistent and strong critique of Creative Commons (which I call Creative Communism) and the copyleftist movement. I've called either to ignore and not apply the phony licenses to your work if you are creative, or to pressure CC to add a "pay me to copy" license.

Accordingly, given my strong and persistent stance -- many people criticize CC once or twice but never come back again because they are browbeaten to death by its supporters -- I have expected the following:

1) Someone who resents my critique and who is their supporter will call me out for "hypocrisy" on the fact that despite being a strong critique of CC, I use photos of people who have indicated they want a CC license. To be sure, I attribute the photos to those persons -- although I refuse to put any CC insignia or marks or notifications on my site -- but they may feel that if I use them *and criticize the idea of CC* I may be "hypocritical and "to be stopped".

2) Someone who resents my critique and is a CC booster will claim that if use attribution-only photos, not for commercial use, but have Google Ads on my blog for Adsense, that I am supposedly "exploiting" their non-commercial pictures "for commercial use".

3) And finally, someone who resnts my critique and supports Lessig and others will invoke the vague wording in the license for attribution  -- "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) -- and say that the mere appearance of their photo on my site implies "endorsement" and therefore they will ask me to remove their photo as they don't endorse me or my views.

And what's interesting is that despite the high potential for "trolling" and heckling and harassment and claw-backs and hatred on the Internet, and despite the near-cult-like fanatacism that some people bring to the whole Creative Commons shill, I've never encountered any of these issues ever on this blog.

Until now, regarding the first one.

And it's not surprising that it's from a persistent sniper and heckler, Pieter Hulshoff, and avid copyleftist and excuser of piracy who endlessly Energizer-Bunnies in the comments here against me, such as in the comments to my article about copyleftist law-faring where he says:

You know, for someone who bashes Creative Commons as much as you do, you use a remarkable amount of images released under that license. :) Since when is "there isn't an easy payment system" an acceptable excuse in your mind?

So...Why do I use Creative Commons "licensed" pictures?

The answer is simple.

Because I can.

Because they are there for the taking, for attribution, and in keeping with other terms they might use, i.e. no mixing, or mixing etc.

I simply given them the attribution they require under their fake "license" as a consideration I'd give anybody who released their work on the Internet for attribution -- and I link back to their page so that someone can go see more of their work and decide if they want to get involved in the CC thing themselves or not. I never put any CC on my own works -- they all say "copyright" and they all mean "pay me to use them".

The CC "licenses" and people who use them do not say, "You can use our system, only if you like our ideas and support us and are one of us". They don't say, "You can't criticize our system or you can't use it." They don't even say, "You must put the CC license jpeg/insignia on your site along with the attribution or you can't use it". But of course, they will likely come to that point some day precisely because they aren't what they seem and pretend.

Pieter is a good example of that duplicity, and a very good example of a shyster who uses fake morality to try to play gotcha in the eternal pirate's undermining of legitimacy for copyright.

He thinks that a critic who says to pirates "lack of ease for payment isn't an excuse to copy" can't therefore justify using a CC license by reverse logic. Basically, he's saying, "You can't use CC unless you support its philosophy, and you can't use CC if you criticize piracy or prosecution of copyleftists -- or else I will call you out as a hypocrite."

That's stupid -- and hey, I saw what you did there.

Like I said: the condition for use of CC isn't "you must refrain from criticism of our lack of a paid option". Or "you must refrain from being a hypocrite". It just says, essentially, "if you copy this, give me credit".

I think the lack of a payment option on CC "licenses" is cunning, conniving, and deliberate. It's not about the difficult of coding payment systems and coupling them to content distribution pages -- that's trivial and done everywhere now. It's not about pretending that payment and distribution are apples and oranges and they don't do those windows. No, it's about a concerted, central, ideological belief that people should not be seeking to commercialize digital items on the Internet. They want to deliberately smash the commodiofication of the digital, and remove any inherent commodification properties it has. That's why they endlessly cite this fake pirate fallacy that you "haven't really stolen anything" when you lift a copy of something that is copyrighted. Of course you have. You've stolen the ability to monetarize by the IP owner.

If people who want attribution also had an easy way to pay them, I'd pay them. But they don't. So I don't. Because I can. They didn't ask for payment. Flickr doesn't add payment options; other sites don't either. They send you to Getty Images sometimes for commercial use, but I'm not a commercial user, and it's too may steps for a casual user to try to convert as a moral action.

No, the Silicon Valley tilt away for payment for the user-generated content is deliberate, ideological, and methodically thwarted. It is no accident, comrade. So I won't be playing that game.

I take those images *because I can* and that's how it's going to be. I don't take them because they haven't made payment easy -- that's the pirate's logic. I take them because they've released them for attribution only, not pay. Full stop.

Trying to gin more out of it is just obvious "trolling" -- a word that I usually reject for usage because it's so overbroad and always used to hamper free speech. But it has a specific connotation for many in this: deliberately heckling and harassing someone over a perceived hypocrisy in the effort to try to get them to somehow concede their hypocrisy or give up. I won't be doing that because I'm not hypocrital, I just take people seriously when they put free content on the Internet for me to take -- with attribution. I do. Because I can. The minute somebody smartens up and bucks the Silicon Valley mandate on this and puts in easy payment options with microcurrency to make small reasonable payments, I'll be all over it.

As for these other two concerns that haven't come up -- they will, inevitably, some day. As my blog gets more traffic, as those people I criticize get more nasty and oh, decide they have "second thoughts" about themselves in pictures at parties with each other with wine glasses or whatever it is that they feel should have only been used by their little friends. And I expect that at some point, they will restort to gambits 2) and 3). They will feel, "Hey, that movie for Larry's 50th birthday should only be used by his friends and admirers to support him, not to criticize him or imply they're goofs". And the moment they do that, they will have proved that they aren't what they seem. They're not a global village; they're just a village.

No. 3 is easy to reject. The ads for my little blog produce minimal income, the blog is not high traffic, and it is impossible to characterize it as a "commercial" blog when nothing is sold on it. The intention of such an edict should be to ensure that, say, newspapers that are commercial entities and that normally have to pay for photos because they sell their newspapers and sell advertising, don't just lift CC photos casually. There is even a successful lawsuit in this regard in Holland by Adam Curry -- where else and by who else, eh?!

But in order to succeed with that notion, CC couldn't just arbitrarily harass little blogs with no income to speak of who aren't selling anything with these pictures -- they're just there to illustrate the blog post and help bring attention to the work of good photographers.

No. 2 I expect to see here some day because I've seen it in the Second Life context.

And the language is indeed overbroad, and those freaks who boost the CC system as a political action will be the first to try to claim an interpretation of that vague language to suit them.

I don't think that they should get to do that, and that if they do that, they will be merely revealing the true nature of Creative Commons as not really about what it claims -- a means for photographers and designers to get their work "out there" and recognized and attributed properly -- but rather a means in fact to actually create that digital commons that is the collectivist vision of the future these technocommunists have.

That's why I don't think they'll hesitate at all to use methods 1) or 2) or 3) to discredit their critics, even though in fact we're all supposed to be able to copy and use these images for distribution on our blogs if we give the people credit -- and they should not claw that back regardless of the free speech used around their freely-given images.

It's only a matter of time before some Marxist-Leninist Occupier who put his work for CC on Flickr demands that it be taken down from my blog because I criticize OWS and he does not want to appear as an endorser of my views. Not to put ideas into their addled little brains, but it's the sort of thing that is coming as the Internet becomes more and more of a contested space.