24 July 2014

US Court Rules Again That Natural Phenomena Cannot Be Patented, Casting Further Doubt On Gene Patents

Back in June, Mike wrote about the important Myriad Genetics judgment from the Supreme Court, which said that naturally-occuring genetic material could not be patented. However, because of some hedging from the judges, there were concerns about how much this would block gene patents in practice. Last week we had an indication that the impact is indeed likely to be significant, as VentureBeat reports: 

On Techdirt.

Is Snowden Inspiring A New Wave Of Whistleblowers?

We noted last week that Japan was bringing in severe new punishments designed to discourage whistleblowing. That might suggest that following Snowden's leaks, there will now be a period of repression where potential whistleblowers lie low to avoid bringing down the wrath of governments on their heads. One person with a better idea than most about what is really going on here is Jesselyn Radack. She's employed by the General Accountability Project (GAP), a leading US whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. Here's part of her biography on the GAP site

On Techdirt.

Why Opening Up Clinical Trials Data Is Good For Pharma Companies Too

Earlier this year we wrote about how AbbVie, the pharma company spun out of Abbott Laboratories, had gone to court to stop the European Medicines Agency (EMA) from releasing clinical trials information about one of its drugs. Despite what AbbVie claimed, this was not commercially sensitive in any way, but simply basic data about safety and efficacy. 

On Techdirt.

German Director Proposes 'One-Stop Shop' For Free, Instant, But Non-Exclusive Licenses To Offer Films Online

It's always heartening to come across new ideas for ways to make creations more widely available to the public while allowing artists to benefit. Here's one from the German film director Fred Breinersdorfer, probably best known for his film "Sophie Scholl". In an article that appeared recently on the newspaper site Süddeutsche.de (original in German), he complains about the fact that searching online for his film throws up plenty of unauthorized versions, but precious few authorized ones. 

On Techdirt.

Japan Likely To Pass New Secrecy Law That Would Put Whistleblowers And Journalists In Jail

One of the many worrying aspects of the Snowden saga is an attempt in the US to reframe whistleblowing as treason, and to make it harder for people to reveal information to journalists or the public that might embarrass the government there. However, things are even worse in other parts of the world. In Japan, for example, there are plans to bring in a new secrecy law that will make whistleblowing even more risky, as Reuters reports: 

On Techdirt.

India's Approach To Pharma Patents Under US Attack, But Other BRICS Nations Likely To Adopt It

Techdirt has been reporting for a while on India's growing success in providing its population with access to low-cost generic drugs, making use of the permissions to do so granted by TRIPS. That has naturally earned it the ire of Western pharma companies, which now seem to be striking back, as this post on Infojustice.org explains: 

On Techdirt.

IETF Begins To Work On Designing A Surveillance-Resistant Net

Edward Snowden's leaks show that the NSA and GCHQ have been systematically subverting key technologies that underlie the Internet. That betrayal of trust has prompted some soul-searching by the Net engineering community, which realizes that it needs to come up with more surveillance-resistant approaches. This story from Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) provides information about the kind of thing they are working on in one key group, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It reports on a speech given by the IETF's chair, Jari Arkko, at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia. 

On Techdirt.

How Much Does Gold-Plated Corporate Sovereignty Cost? $1 Billion Or About 2% Of A Developing Country's GDP

Last week we wrote about the rising threat of corporate sovereignty, known more obscurely as "investor-state dispute settlement", that allows companies to sue countries for alleged loss of future profits. Just how grave that threat is for developing nations can be gauged by the following, reported by Tico Times: 

On Techdirt.

TTIP Update VI

In my previous TTIP update, I reported on an extremely important leak about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), which is the other half of the US attempt to stitch up world trade through supranational treaties. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Turning Mozilla Thunderbird into a Phoenix

I've always been a big fan of Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, even when it was unfashionable to admit it. Because, for the last few years, the view amongst those "in the know" was that email was dead, that nobody used it, and that even if they did, Web-based systems like Gmail meant that Thunderbird and its ilk were dinosaurs. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Resisting Surveillance on a Unprecedented Scale III

(The previous two parts of this essay appeared earlier.)

Or maybe not. There is a rough consensus among cryptography experts that the theoretical underpinnings of encryption - the mathematical foundations - remain untouched. The problem lies in the implementation and the environment in which encryption is used. Edward Snowden probably knows better than most what the true situation is, and here's how he put it:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

That's a hugely important clue as to what we need to do. It tells us that there is nothing wrong with crypto as such, just the corrupted implementations of otherwise strong encryption techniques. That is confirmed by recent leaks of information that show computer software companies complicit in weakening the supposedly safe products they sell - truly a betrayal of the trust placed in them by their customers.

The good news is that we have an alternative. For the last few decades, free software/open source has been building a software ecosystem that is outside the control of the traditional computer industry. That makes it much harder for the NSA to subvert, since the code is developed openly, which allows anyone to inspect it and look for backdoors - secret ways to spy on and control the software.

That's not to say free software is completely immune to security issues. Many open source products come from companies, and it's possible that some of them may have been pressured to weaken aspects of their work. Free software applications might be subverted as they are converted from the source code, which can be easily checked for backdoors, to the binaries - the versions that actually run on a computer - which can't. There is also potential for online holdings of open source programs to be broken into and tampered with in subtle ways.

Despite those problems, open source is still the best hope we have when it comes to using strong encryption. But in the wake of Snowden's revelations, the free software community needs to take additional precautions so as to minimise the risk that code is still vulnerable to attacks and subversion by spy agencies.

Beyond such measures, the open source world should also start thinking about writing a new generation of applications with strong crypto built in. These already exist, but are often hard to use. More needs to be done to make them appropriate for general users: the latter may not care much about the possibility that the NSA or GCHQ is monitoring everything they do online, but if they are offered great tools that make it easy to resist such efforts, more people may adopt them, just as millions have switched to the Firefox browser - not because it supports open standards, but because it is better.

Although the scale of the spying revealed by Snowden's leaks is staggering, and the leaks about the thoroughgoing and intentional destruction of the Internet's entire trust and security systems are shocking, there is no reason for despair. Even in the face of widespread public ignorance and indifference to the threat such total surveillance represents to democracy, as far as we know we can still use strong encryption implemented in open source software to protect our privacy.

Indeed, this may be an opportunity for open source to be embraced by a wider public, since we now know definitively that commercial software cannot be trusted, and is effectively spyware that you have to pay for. And just as Moore's Law allows the NSA and GCHQ to pull in and analyse ever-more of our data, so free software, too, can benefit.

For as Moore's Law continues to drive down the prices of personal computing devices - whether PCs, smartphones or tablets - so more people in developing countries around the world are able to acquire them. Many will adopt free software, since Western software companies often price their products at unreasonably-high levels compared to local disposable income. As open source is used more widely, so the number of people keen and able to contribute to such projects will grow, the software will improve, and more people will use it. In other words, there is a virtuous circle that produces its own kind of scaling that will help to counteract the more malign kind that underlies the ever-expanding surveillance activities of the NSA and GCHQ. As well as tools of repression, computers can also be tools of resistance when powered by free software, which is called that for a reason.

Resisting Surveillance on a Unprecedented Scale II

(The first part of this three-part essay appeared yesterday.)

The gradual but relentless shift from piecemeal, small-scale analogue eavesdropping to constant and total surveillance may also help to explain the public's relative equanimity in the face of these revelations. Once we get beyond the facile idea that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear - everybody has something to hide, even if it is only the private moments in their lives - there is another common explanation that people offer as to why they are not particularly worried about the activities of the NSA and GCHQ. This is that "nobody would be interested" in what they are up to, and so they are confident that they have not been harmed by the storage and analysis of the Internet data.

This is based on a fundamentally analogue view of what is going on. These people are surely right that no spy is sitting at a keyboard reading their emails or Facebook posts. That's clearly not possible, even if the will were there. But it's not necessary, since the data can be "read" by tireless programs that extract key information at an accelerating pace and diminishing cost thanks to Moore's Law.

People are untroubled by this because most of them can't imagine what today's top computers can do with their data, and think again in analogue terms - the spy sifting slowly through so much information as to be swamped. And that's quite understandable, since even computer experts struggle to keep up with the pace of development, and to appreciate the ramifications.

A post on the Google Search blog from last year may help to provide some sense of just how powerful today's systems are:

When you enter a single query in the Google search box, or just speak it to your phone, you set in motion as much computing as it took to send Neil Armstrong and eleven other astronauts to the moon. Not just the actual flights, but all the computing done throughout the planning and execution of the 11-year, 17 mission Apollo program. That’s how much computing has advanced.

Now add in the fact that three billion Google queries are entered each day, and that the NSA's computing capability is probably vastly greater than Google's, and you have some idea of the raw power available for the analysis of the "trivial" data gathered about all of us, and how that might lead to very non-trivial knowledge about our most intimate lives.

In terms of how much information can be held, a former NSA technical director, William Binney, estimates that one NSA data centre currently being built in Utah will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data - that's five million million gigabytes. If you were to print out that information as paper documents, and store them in traditional filing cabinets, it would require around 42 million million cabinets occupying 17 million square kilometres of floor space.

Neither computing power nor the vast holdings of personal data on their own are a direct threat to our privacy and freedom But putting them together means that the NSA can not only find anything in those 42 million million virtual cabinets more or less instantly, but that it can cross-reference any word on any piece of paper in any cabinet - something that can't even be contemplated as an option for human operators, let alone attempted.

It is this unprecedented ability to consolidate all the data about us, along with the data of our family, friends and acquaintances, and their family, friends and acquaintances (and sometimes even the acquaintances of our acquaintances' acquaintances) that creates the depth of knowledge the NSA has at its disposal whenever it wants it. And while it is unlikely to call up that knowledge for most of us, it only takes a tiny anomalous event somewhere deep in the chain of acquaintance for a suspicion to propagate back through the links to taint all our innocent records, and to cause them to be added to the huge pile of data that will cross-referenced and sifted and analysed in the search for significant patterns so deep that we are unlikely to be aware of them.

Given this understandable, if regrettable, incomprehension on the part of the public about the extraordinary power at the disposal of the NSA, and what it might be able to extract as a result, the key question then becomes: what can we do to bolster our privacy? Until a few weeks ago, most people working in this field would have said "encrypt everything". But the recent revelations that the NSA and GCHQ have succeeded in subverting just about every encryption system that is widely used online seem to destroy even that last hope.

(In tomorrow's instalment: the way forward.)

Resisting Surveillance on a Unprecedented Scale I

Netzpolitik.org is the leading site covering digital rights in German. It played a key role in helping to stop ACTA last year, and recently has been much occupied with the revelations about NSA spying, and its implications. As part of that, it has put together a book/ebook (in German) as a first attempt to explore the post-Snowden world we now inhabit. I've contributed a new essay, entitled "Resisting Surveillance on a Unprecedented Scale", which is my own attempt to sum up what happened, and to look forward to what our response should be. I'll be publishing it here, split up into three parts, over the next few days.


Despite being a journalist who has been writing about the Internet for 20 years, and a Briton who has lived under the unblinking eye of millions of CCTV cameras for nearly as long, I am nonetheless surprised by the revelations of Edward Snowden. I have always had a pretty cynical view of governments and their instruments of power such as the police and secret services; I have always tried to assume the worst when it comes to surveillance and the assaults on my privacy. But I never guessed that the US and UK governments, aided and abetted to varying degrees by other countries, could be conducting what amounts to total, global surveillance of the kind revealed by Snowden's leaked documents.

I don't think I'm alone in this. Even though some people are now claiming this level of surveillance was "obvious", and "well-known" within the industry, that's not my impression. Judging by the similarly shocked and outraged comments from many defenders of civil liberties and computer experts, particularly in the field of security, they, like me, never imagined that things were quite this bad. That raises an obvious question: how did it happen?

Related to that outrage in circles that concern themselves with these issues, is something else that needs explaining: the widespread lack of outrage among ordinary citizens. To be sure, some countries are better than others in understanding the implications of what has been revealed to us by Snowden (and some are worse - the UK in particular). But given the magnitude and thoroughgoing nature of the spying that is being conducted on our online activities, the response around the world has been curiously muted. We need to understand why, otherwise the task of rolling back at least some of the excesses will be rendered even more difficult.

The final question that urgently requires thought is what can, in fact, be done? Since the level of public concern is relatively low, even in those countries that are traditionally sensitive about privacy issues - Germany, for example - what are the alternatives to stricter government controls, which seem unlikely to be forthcoming?

Although there was a Utopian naivety in the mid-1990s about what the Internet might bring about, it has been clear for a while that the Internet has its dark side, and could be used to make people less, not more, free. This has prompted work to move from a completely open network, with information sent unencrypted, to one where Web connections using the HTTPS technology shield private information from prying eyes. It's remarkable that it has only been in recent years that the pressure to move to HTTPS by default has grown strong.

That's perhaps a hint of how the current situation of total surveillance has arisen. Although many people knew that unencrypted data could be intercepted, there was a general feeling that it wouldn't be possible to find the interesting streams amongst the huge and growing volume flooding every second of the day through the series of digital tubes that make up the Internet.

But that overlooked one crucial factor: Moore's Law, and its equivalents for storage and connectivity. Crudely stated, this asserts that the cost of a given computational capability will halve every 18 months or so. Put another way, for a given expenditure, the available computing power doubles every year and half. And it's important to remember that this is geometric growth: after ten years, Moore's Law predicts computing power increases by a factor of around 25 for a given cost.

Now add in the fact that the secret services are one of the least constrained when it comes to spending money on the latest and fastest equipment, since the argument can always be made that the extra power will be vitally important in getting information that could save lives and so on. One of the first and most extraordinary revelations conveyed from Snowden by the Guardian gave an insight into how that extra and constantly increasing computing power is being applied, in what was called the Tempora programme:

By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans.

The intercept probes on the transatlantic cables gave GCHQ access to its special source exploitation. Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it - for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata.

As that indicates, two years ago the UK's GCHQ was pulling in data at the rate of 2 terabits a second: by now it is certain to be far higher than that. Thanks to massive storage capabilities, GCHQ could hold the complete Internet flow for three days, and its metadata for 30 days.

There is one very simple reason why GCHQ is doing this: because at some point it realised it could, not just practically, because of Moore's Law, but also legally. The UK legislation that oversees this activity - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) - was passed in 2000, and drawn up based on the experience of the late 1990s. It was meant to regulate one-off interception of individuals, and most of it is about carrying out surveillance of telephones and the postal system. In other words, it was designed for an analogue world. The scale of the digital surveillance now taking place is so far beyond what was possible ten years ago, that RIPA's framing of the law - never mind its powers - are obsolete, and GCHQ is essentially able to operate without either legal or technical constraints.

(In tomorrow's instalment: why isn't the public up in arms over this?)

Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, on EME and DRM

A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area.

 On Open Enterprise blog.
A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm#sthash.bJs9GIQu.dpuf

TTIP Update V

Today's update is a little odd, since it's not actually about TAFTA/TTIP, at least not directly. Although the second round is taking place this week, it's almost certain we'll be told nothing about the real substance of the discussions. That's because even though these massive trade agreements affect hundreds of millions of people, the latter are not given any opportunity to see the draft texts as they are discussed, or to have any meaningful dialogue with the negotiators. That may have been acceptable 30 years ago, but in the age of the Internet, when it is trivial to make documents available, and easy to enter into online discussions, it's outrageous.

On Open Enterprise blog.
few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm#sthash.bJs9GIQu.dpuf
few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm#sthash.bJs9GIQu.dpuf
A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm#sthash.bJs9GIQu.dpuf

TTIP Update IV

One of the key issues during the ACTA negotiations was transparency - or rather the lack of it. Despite a few token gestures from the European Commission initially, TAFTA/TTIP looks like it will be just as bad. Here's a rather cheap trick the negotiators have just played:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Behold the Bankruptcy of Software Patents

You may recall back in 2011, there was an extraordinary bidding war for the patents of Nortel Networks:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Help: EU Net Neutrality Consultation Closes Today

As you may recall, back in September the European Commission finally came out with its proposals for net neutrality, part of its larger "Connected Continent" package designed to complete the telecoms single market. I learned yesterday that the European committee responsible for this area, ITRE (Industry, Research and Energy), has launched something of a stealth consultation on these proposals. Stealth, because neither I nor anyone else that I know covering this area, was aware of them, which is pretty bizarre.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Coming Chinese Android Invasion

Remember all those years ago, when people laughed at the first Android phones (which were, to tell the truth, pretty clunky, but still...). Remember how Apple fans have always insisted that however well Android did in the smartphone market, it would always be second best, and never seriously threaten Apple's dominance? Well here's what actually happened:



On Open Enterprise blog.

2009: Man Buys 5000 Bitcoins For $27, Forgets About Them. 2013: Man Rediscovers His Bitcoins, Now Worth $886,000

Bitcoin shares with drones the unhappy distinction of being the subject of almost exclusively negative reports. Just as drones are usually doing bad things to people, so Bitcoins are usually helping people do bad things because of their supposed untraceability. So it makes a pleasant change to come across an upbeat Bitcoin story like this, as told by the Guardian: 

On Techdirt.

European Court Of Justice Hands Down Big Win For Transparency in Europe

Russia's Leading Social Network VKontakte Cleared Of Copyright Infringement

VKontakte is not only the largest social networking site in Russia, but is also one of the biggest unauthorized repositories of copyright music, thanks to its file-hosting service. Given the moves to clamp down on copyright infringement in Russia, it seemed only a matter of time before VKontakte found itself in hot water because of this. And yet, as Torrent Freak reports, something unexpected has happened

On Techdirt.

Bruce Schneier On The Feudal Internet And How To Fight It

There aren't many upsides to Snowden's revelations that NSA is essentially spying on the entire Internet, all the time, but if one good thing has already come out of that sorry state of affairs it's the emergence of security expert Bruce Schneier as a mainstream commentator on the digital world. That's largely because his core expertise has been shoved into the very center of our concerns, making his thoughts on what's going on particularly valuable.

On Techdirt.

Trade Agreements Are Designed To Give Companies Corporate Sovereignty

One of the difficulties of making people aware of the huge impact that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses in TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are likely to have on their lives, is that the name is so boring, and so they tend to assume that what it describes is also boring and not worth worrying about. And yet what began as an entirely reasonable system for protecting investments in emerging economies with weak judiciaries, through the use of independent tribunals, has turned into a monster that now allows companies to place themselves above national laws, as Techdirt has reported before. 

On Techdirt.

Wikipedia Fights Back Against Socking

The idea that Wikipedia is dying has become one of the Internet's recurrent stories. Because something used by so many people every day is completely free and dependent on the selfless dedication of relatively few individuals, there is perhaps an underlying fear that it will disappear, and it will be our fault for not supporting it better. However, alongside major issues like the need for an influx of new contributors from more diverse backgrounds, one of the lesser-known challenges Wikipedia faces is the rise of "socking", or sock puppetry. Here's how Wikipedia defines the term

On Techdirt.