School Teacher Will Sue HADOPI

A 54-year-old school teacher in France appeared to be one of the first users to be disconnected from the web under HADOPI legislation. However, he has no idea how to download illegal copies of copyrighted content, saying that he became the victim of Wi-Fi hacking.

The industry observers are tired to insist that the “three-strikes” legislation, which is quickly developed throughout the world, involves false accusations. In other words, there is probability that people who don’t download illegal content will find themselves cut off the web because the system is guilty until proven innocent.

So, the story with a teacher becomes one of the most predictable ones that the media have covered all year. A 54-year-old school teacher turned out to be disconnected from the Internet because his IP address was used by someone else to infringe copyright. The problem is that the teacher himself has never downloaded copyrighted content on the Internet. That’s why he’s planning to fight HADOPI, which only began issuing these notifications back in October of last year. According to the media reports, the teacher is even ready to take this issue to the European Justice court.

Meanwhile, the sad part of the issue is that the teacher is fighting HADOPI at great expense. Aside from having to fight the court charges, he’ll have to move from the countryside at his own expense if the problem be escalated to going to the European court.

Now the question is how this happened at the first place. Apparently, the teacher’s Wi-Fi connection was hacked. When he had received the second wrongful accusation, he took steps to secure the connection, but failed to do so, as the hackers still succeeded in breaking in to his Wi-Fi connection and his IP address was registered downloading the illegal copy of the movie “Iron Man 2”. In the meantime, the teacher is being accused of downloading that film though he has no idea how it is done.

The story came as no surprise, because with such a highly publicized new policy and outfit, Internet users were bound to cover their tracks by breaking in to someone else’s Wi-Fi connection in order to use their IP address to avoid detection. As the result, innocent citizens will get disconnected, while those responsible keep doing the same. It seems that the teacher won’t be the last target.

Court Demanded To Decrypt Password

In the 21st century, the talk is again about the Fifth Amendment! Some individual is alleged of a mortgage scam, which is not the rare case, but it can prove a test case to see whether it’s unconstitutional for the American government to punish people for refusing to disclose their encryption codes.

According to media reports, the US government has a federal judge to order the accused individual (a woman), Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt her encrypted laptop after she refused the authorities to do so. But it still has to be decided if such a request breaks the American Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which, as you remember, allows citizens to remain silent if they are charged.

The attorney of the suspected woman, Philip Dubois, argued that defendants cannot be constitutionally obligated to help the authorities interpret their files. In response, the American Justice Department insists that the court order is actually a simple extension of a long-standing ability of prosecutors to gather data that could become evidence at the trial.

In case Ramona Fricosu fails to compel, she amounts to a concession that criminals get an easy way out of prosecution – they can simply encrypt all their files and the police won’t be able to access them and collect evidence. Of course, the authorities don’t want this, so the government insists that the accused woman will be allowed to type her passwords in and unlock the encrypted files, and there will be nobody looking over her shoulder to see the passwords themselves. All the authorities wanted was the decrypted information, and they stressed that they didn’t require the woman to provide the password to the laptop – neither orally nor in written form.

The case attracted the attention of many civil rights groups, many of which are saying that the US citizens cannot be demanded to give any compelled testimonial communications. So, the rights groups wanted the legal shield of the Fifth Amendment to cover encryption passwords as well. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) also insisted that the Justice Department's request should have been rejected, because the Fifth Amendment reads that no person can be forced to be a witness against himself in any criminal case.

Hackers Exposed Military And Government Accounts

Operation AntiSec is on its way, with more and more government services being compromised. Once again, nearly 17,000 e-mail accounts have been dumped to one of the file-sharing services a while ago. It appeared that the 1.18MB text file was posted by Connexion Hack Team, exposing government and military e-mail addresses and passwords. In addition, lots of popular e-mail providers can also be found in the list of leaked accounts.

It was just a few days ago that Connexion had dumped information from a California government online service. Apparently, now they’ve made another information dump. The Connexion Hack Team released a statement, saying that the emails and passwords were random, and refused to say which website they had come from. Those who suspect their emails to be contained in the list, are encouraged to check it by search, and if it is, to pick another address.

In fact, there are lots of government e-mails from everywhere, including e-mails from the NSA, Virginia, the DHS, and so on. To some of the users’ credit, they did have passwords containing a combination of letters, numbers and symbols, but there were not many of those. The most funny password was “changeme”, which the hackers commented “mega lulz”.

As for the military accounts, there were also a few of them containing a combination of symbols, which meant to take much longer to crack such a password. These were perhaps obtained in another way in this case.

Meanwhile, the rest of e-mails and passwords are all over the map, published in alphabetical order which, strangely enough, end on the letter “s”. It isn’t clear whether there’ll be a second dump or anything after the letter “s” is quite safe for now. Exposed domains include a lot of Yahoo and Spartans.nsu, as well as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, BellSouth, Earthlink, Comcast, Sprint.Blackberry, vzpix, sbcglobal, Cox, Verizon, NSU, and many more.

It’s quite hard to know for sure how all of those emails were obtained, if you take into consideration that it was just a random smattering of addresses. Undoubtedly, such accounts will emerge somewhere else for people wondering if their accounts were exposed. Meanwhile, those who want to know it right now are free to download the whole list from MediaFire while it’s still up.

UK Will Enforce Internet Filtering

Blocking access to websites has been widely discussed in the United States with the PROTECT IP act first proposed this past spring. However, with the Senate approving the legislation, it turned out that the US isn’t the only country discussing the possibility of filtering the web.

Some leaked document, labeled “confidential”, has been posted on Open Rights Group website. The document in question details a proposal by the entertainment industry to pressure UK broadband providers to take part in a voluntary website blocking agreement. Such system is described as an approach to preventing access to online services which are focused upon copyright violation.

Meanwhile, for the public there are many reasons to be concerned, the main one being that the proposal is being discussed behind closed doors. In fact, this is the same as when pro-copyright outfits were trying to push for many controversial provisions in ACTA. This time, everything is being planned behind closed doors as well. However, when Wikileaks published the documents relating to ACTA back in 2008, it caused a major outcry from the public and human rights groups, and the same is expected now with the filtering proposal.

Indeed, according to the leaked document, “voluntary” Great Firewall of Britain will be just the same. Criticisms of the current proposal are all the same as well: was the system so bad that the industry decided to hide it from the public?

In addition, there are more reasons to be concerned. For example, the document, whilst mentioning evidence gathering, “prior warning and liberty”, also notes a turn-around time which is quick enough for “live events”, as well as a balance between swift action and evidence. Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a technical solution enabling Internet service providers to enforce an effective block within the time scale of a “live event”, regardless of the time it takes a court to act.

The Open Rights Group was the first to express concern for this policy, saying that it sets out a dangerous voluntary scheme involving so-called “expedited court procedures” as well as a “balance” between evidence and speed of action. Meanwhile, definitions of which content should be blocked are quite scarce, and there are no references to exactly how filtering would work. In the end, everyone understands that ISPs won’t be able to really prevent Internet users from accessing blocked services, since all it really takes to access them is the right proxy.