“As we said in our brief, ‘Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content,’” Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee said in a statement provided to AllThingsD. “Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

Twitter’s filing comes after Harris’s initial motion to quash was struck down in court. The court found that Harris lacked the legal standing to challenge the request for Twitter information on his own behalf.

Harris, a senior editor at online publication The New Inquiry, was arrested in conjunction with a massive Occupy Wall Street protest last October that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. He was one of more than 700 people arrested.

In Harris’s defense, Twitter cites the First Amendment as grounds for support, contesting that “content that Twitter users create and submit to Twitter are clearly a form of electronic communication that, accordingly, implicates First Amendment protections.” Twitter also contends that the request is a Fourth Amendment violation (unlawful search and seizure, for those of you who skipped PoliSci 101).

The reasoning behind Twitter’s motion most likely boils down to two things: First, if Twitter users as a whole don’t have sufficient standing to defend themselves against subpoenas for information, it then becomes Twitter’s responsibility to do so. With a subscriber base of more than 140 million active users, that’s a lot of litigation to sort through. It’s simply a scaleability issue. So, on the one hand, Twitter filing a motion that would essentially put the defense back in Harris’s hands is essentially Twitter practicing enlightened self-interest.

But in another, more gallant way of viewing the case, the motion signals just how strong Twitter is on the right to privacy of its user base. Aside from safeguarding against a future of similar requests, Twitter doesn’t have to stick up for its users like this.

“In Internet meme parlance, Twitter is basically telling the government: ‘Come at me bro,’” privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian told AllThingsD in an interview.

And it’s not the first time Twitter has stood up to the government. Late last year, Twitter challenged a court order requesting information on a number of people involved with WikiLeaks, including Julian Assange. Specifically, Twitter challenged a “gag order” included in the request, which specifically barred the company from telling WikiLeaks members that the government was requesting their account information. By challenging the order, Twitter effectively let these account holders know that the government was going after their information, which allowed them in turn to defend themselves against the government requests.

This may not sound like much. But most of this litigation is dealt with by outside counsel which Twitter hired specifically to deal with these cases, and that isn’t cheap. And there’s no direct financial incentive for the company to stand up against a request for information such as this one.

In all, it’s a bold move by the microblogging company, and one it isn’t required to make.

Here’s the promo, released this morning. The first episode, featuring Assange chatting up bird-flipping Super Bowl performer M.I.A., runs April 17. WikiLeaks says you should be able to watch it on the Web and via Russian cable news network RT, which you can get in the U.S. via the Dish Network and on some Comcast and Time Warner Cable systems.

WikiLeaks says Assange has taped 12 of these so far. I hope one of the guests turns out to be Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader.

AllThingsD.com

Yet now that the attacks have subsided, it’s time to see them for what they are: Nothing more than a blunt instrument that accomplishes nothing constructive.

As of today, only one of the Web sites attacked by the hacker troupe Anonymous is still apparently affected, and that belongs to the Universal Music Group recording label. It currently displays only a message saying “The Site is under maintenance. Please expect it to be back shortly.” Others that had been attacked yesterday, including the sites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America all seemed to be operating normally.

Thursday’s attacks, which have been described as the biggest action yet organized by Anonymous, were launched in apparent revenge for the FBI’s arrest of several people associated with the file-sharing site Megaupload.com over suspicions of online piracy. Taking place against the backdrop of a wider, more civil protest against anti-piracy legislation currently before the U.S. Congress, the atmosphere around the attacks has been politically charged.

As Molly Wood of CNET put it, the #OpMegaUpload attacks — coming as they did on the heels of Wednesday’s peaceful anti-SOPA protest — seem like an “unsettling wave of car-burning hooligans that sweep in and incite the riot portion of the play,” spurring equally unsettling reactions from the powers that be.

Many outlets have portrayed the attacks as “hacks,” implying that someone had picked a lock in order to commit some kind of sabotage. But the tactic used — a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — is more aptly compared to a blunt instrument, requiring neither skill nor knowledge, only large numbers of willing participants who team up to swarm a site with more requests than it can accommodate and thus overwhelm its ability to function normally.

The adjective “willing” is debatable, and perhaps inaccurate. Anonymous was able to generate such impressive numbers with the operation — it claimed more than 5,000 participants — by spamming a link in chat rooms and via Twitter that, when clicked, triggered a tool used to launch the attack. People tricked into following the link are given no context or information, and so may or may not have any idea that they’re participating in the execution of a crime.

For the record, it is illegal in the U.S., the U.K., Sweden and other countries to launch and participate in a DDoS attack like the one Anonymous organized. As anyone who has observed the evolution of Anonymous (and its various affiliates using the names LulzSec and AntiSec) should know, the FBI arrested 16 people last July, many of them charged with participating in a DDoS attack against PayPal in protest of its shutting down an account used by WikiLeaks.

In 2009, a New Jersey man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for launching a DDoS attack against the Church of Scientology. And in 2010, a 23-year-old Ohio man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for launching DDoS attacks against several prominent U.S. conservatives, including the author Ann Coulter, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly.

Records like that suggest to me that DDoS attacks never accomplish anything that the people who organize and carry them out attempt to do. At most, they inconvenience the people who visit and operate the targeted sites for a few hours, until the attention spans of the attackers shift elsewhere. They also generate headlines that are forgotten by nearly everyone except the targets, and sometimes law enforcement.

And so it will be this time. Mark your calendars, because the Megaupload revenge attacks will spur a series of arrests later this year. Some of those arrested will be people who didn’t know they were committing a crime. And that certainly won’t help Anonymous’ image. Nor will it further a single bit of what passes for the Anonymous agenda.

This was a very apolitical group that had absolutely no understanding about the military-industrial complex whatsoever, and no understanding about international finance. As a result of joining our battle and trying to protect themselves, they have come to see that the threats related to Internet freedom come from the military-industrial complex, the banking system and the media.

– Julian Assange, in Rolling Stone, referring to Anonymous

iStockphoto | oblachko

The plan is simple: Sites participating in the protest will go dark for the day or take some other action. Wikipedia, for example, will black out the English-language portions of its site for 24 hours. The move will likely shut out some 10 million users during the course of the day.

Politico pegs the estimated number of sites that will be affected in some way by the protest at 7,000.

Among the sites participating:

• Google will post a link on its home page to a document explaining its opposition to the bill.
• Mozilla.com, home of the popular Web browser Firefox, will go dark will do two things, see the update below.
• Reddit, the social news site owned by Advance Publications, will go dark.
• WordPress.org will go dark.
• TwitPic, the popular site where Twitter users share photographs, will go dark.
• MoveOn.org, the liberal-leaning political site, will go dark.
• The Cheezburger network, including sites like The Daily What and Fail Blog, will be dark.
• BoingBoing.net will be dark.
• Several gaming companies, including Minecraft.net, Riot Games, Epic Games, 38 Studios and Red 5 Studios, will be dark.

Update: Mozilla just sent a statement outlining what it will do for the protest: It will redirect traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English websites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time. It will also make the default Firefox start page black so that the tens of millions of Firefox users will see a black page with a call to action message rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo.

Since the list is in flux, Irish bookmakers saw a chance to get into the act by accepting bets concerning which sites will go down for the day and which ones won’t.

Wikileaks was the favorite at 5-to-1 odds that it would join the protest. Myspace, the once mighty social network, was running a close second at 7 to 1, while Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, was at 8 to 1. Here’s a list of additional bets that Paddy Power was accepting:

14/1 YouTube
40/1 Amazon
50/1 Yahoo!
66/1 Facebook
66/1 TMZ
66/1 IMDb
80/1 LinkedIn
80/1 EMI
100/1 Twitter
100/1 eBay
100/1 AOL
100/1 iTunes
100/1 HBO
100/1 MSN
200/1 Sony
200/1 Universal Studios
200/1 Bing
200/1 Ask
250/1 BBC
250/1 Disney
500/1 Google
500/1 Fox

According to a U.S. District Court opinion in the case of three WikiLeaks associates, it should.

Judge Liam O’Grady ruled Thursday that the associates had no reasonable expectation of privacy when they used Twitter services, even if the information in question was known only to Twitter and not publicly disclosed. The government is seeking data from their accounts including their devices’ Internet protocol (IP) addresses, which can reveal information about location, and data on people with whom they communicated.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Web site — which publishes leaked, sensitive documents — said it is temporarily suspending all publishing operations so that it can devote its resources to battling Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.’s PayPal, Bank of America Corp. and other companies that have prohibited payments to the site since last December.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Sonic said it fought the government’s order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was “rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do,” said Sonic’s chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government’s request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full emails.

Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years old, hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

I’ve spoken with contacts at three FBI field offices — one here in New York, one in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco. I’m told that in New York search warrants were executed on homes in Brooklyn and in the towns of Baldwin and Merrick on Long Island. A source familiar with the investigation says that IP addresses that have come under scrutiny in the course of the investigation have led agents to search those addresses, but that no arrests have yet been made in New York.

Agents in California have made arrests, though the number and the names of those arrested have not yet been released. Additionally, Fox News is reporting that the FBI made arrests related to the investigation this morning in Florida and New Jersey, and that as many as a dozen people have been arrested in the operation nationwide. Obviously more information will be forthcoming as the situation develops.

The investigation is related specifically to the distributed denial-of-service attacks that were carried out last year and early this year against several companies in the U.S. The attacks were in sympathy with Wikileaks, which had just started disclosing its cache of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Visa, the credit card company, was one of its victims.

The group has grown recently as it absorbed another group of hackers calling itself LulzSec, which had harassed Sony in response to its lawsuits against a person who reverse engineered the security on the Playstation gaming console.

Arrests of Anonymous members have previously been reported in the U.K. , in Turkey and in Spain.

Fox has some raw video from the scene where one of the search warrants was executed on Long Island today. It’s below.

[Image and video via Fox News]

The release, some 446 megabytes of documents that are considered sensitive, is intended, the group says, as a retaliation for a controversial Arizona state law that makes it legal for police officers to question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. The documents were released via the BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. More such releases are coming, LulzSec said.

“We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial-profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona,” the group said in its latest statement.

LulzSec had been promising that it would release its first Payload on Friday; it was announced on Twitter not long after midnight London time. Their typical pattern suggests they’re active during the night and early morning hours U.K. time, making the fact that Scotland Yard arrested a 19-year old linked to the group all the more interesting.

Presenting Chinga La Migra: http://t.co/tQZ1uro | http://t.co/apl4g7J #AntiSec

June 23, 2011 3:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@LulzSec

The Lulz Boat

The release followed a day during which a rival group claimed to have attacked and defaced a Web site said to belong to a LulzSec member. The other group of hackers, calling itself TeaMp0isoN — or, in English, Team Poison — a group with a long history of defacing Web sites going back to mid-2009. Fox News managed to interview someone with that group, who called LulzSec a bunch of “script kiddies,” an epithet meant to convey the idea that for all the media attention it has attracted in recent weeks, LulzSec’s actual hacking skills aren’t terribly impressive.

The group defaced a Web site belonging to someone in the Netherlands they say is a member of LulzSec and are on a campaign to name LulzSec members and out them to police. As always, their claims are impossible to vet. But they do suggest that all the media noise that LulzSec is making is starting to grate on other members of the so-called hacker underground. Team Poison isn’t the first to express such sentiment. A group calling itself Web Ninjas has sought to expose the people it says are LulzSec members. And another possibly connected person or group tried to do the same thing before that, and even claimed an arrest that hadn’t occurred.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Despite All the Attention, LulzSec Hackers Failed
• At The Height Of Their Infamy, LulzSec Hackers Call It Quits
• Arizona Confirms LulzSec Docs Are Authentic, Worries About Officer Safety
• LulzSec Goes All Wikileaks On Arizona State Cops
• LulzSec Shrugs After Scotland Yard Nabs Hacking Suspect (Updated)
• LulzSec And Anonymous Team Up to Hack Governments and Banks
• Viral Video: LulzSec Gets Taiwanesed
• CIA Web Site Goes Down; LulzSec Takes Credit
• LulzSec Blasts Space Game Eve Online, Other Gaming Sites
• LulzSec Strikes Again, Hits Bethesda Softworks And U.S. Senate
• Turkey Arrests 32 Alleged Members of Anonymous, Days After Arrests in Spain
• Web Security Start-Up Cloudflare Gets Buzz, Courtesy of LulzSec Hackers
• No Hacks to Report at Xbox, But Microsoft Isn’t Letting Its Guard Down
• No LulzSec Hackers Have Been Arrested–At Least Not Yet
• LulzSec Posts More Sony Data, Amid Claim One of Them Is Arrested
  LulzSec Strikes Again, Claims Attack On Nintendo Server
  Sony Hacked for What Seems To Be the Umpteenth Time

• Sony’s Playstation Network Is Back. Sony’s Reputation Will Take a Little Longer.
• Exclusive: Sony Considers Offering Reward to Help Catch Hackers
• Anonymous Claims It Took No Credit Card Numbers From Sony
• Sony Implicates Anonymous in Attack; Group Denies Involvement
• Sony Apologizes For the Playstation Network Breach
• Sony Blames PlayStation Outage on “External Intrusion”

The arrests come only three days after police in Spain arrested three alleged members of the group in that country, apparently finding one of the servers used in the attacks in one of the houses raided. Anonymous retaliated in typical fashion, launching a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Web site of the Spanish National Police.

Anonymous stands accused of attacking the Web site of Turkey’s board of elections right before national elections held there Sunday. The group is also said to have attacked the Web site of the Turkish Directorate of Telecommunications in protest over Internet censorship. The ruling AK Party plans to introduce a new filtering system that the country’s Internet users will be required to use.

France and Spain aren’t the only European countries who have arrested alleged members of Anonymous. In January, police in the United Kingdom arrested five people ranging in age from 15 to 26 in an early morning raid following attacks against Mastercard and PayPal among others.

And if all that weren’t enough hacker news for you, LulzSec, the mysterious group that has been hacking Sony Web sites right, left and center, is still on the loose. Having made a Web security start-up famous in the course of its self-styled campaign of chaos, or what it would call lulz, over the weekend it released 26,000 user names and passwords to an adult site. Today it took to taunting game publisher Bethesda Softworks via its Twitter feed. The company just released a new game, Brink , and the group hinted that its next exploit will have something to do with that game.

Bethesda, we broke into your site over two months ago. We’ve had all of your Brink users for weeks. Please fix your junk, thanks! ^_^

June 13, 2011 9:57 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@LulzSec

The Lulz Boat

LulzSec said in a posting on Pastebin.com (read it in full below) and on Twitter that no members of the group had been arrested. “We don’t even know who he is,” the group said of the person whose arrest had been claimed. (I’m deliberately choosing not to use the person’s name.)

The claim of an arrest came in an anonymous posting to Full Disclosure, an independent mailing list for security professionals and researchers, and followed the posting by LulzSec of the latest prize in its ongoing campaign against Sony, the source code used to run a network for Sony software developers.

The hacker group has been making headlines of late, both for its assault on Sony and Web sites belonging to PBS and Nintendo, and for its attack against the Atlanta chapter of Infraguard, a non-profit organization affiliated with the FBI that is devoted to sharing security information between the FBI and private businesses.

As I warned this morning, the arrest claim may very well have been nothing more than a hoax whose exact purpose isn’t entirely clear. However, there’s at least one suggestion that the group, at least statistically speaking, already may have a stool pigeon among its ranks.

Eric Corley, the publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, says in this interview with The Guardian that roughly one in four members of the hacker underground are informers for either the FBI or the U.S. Secret Service.

Those hackers who do get caught are persuaded to inform on their associates with the threat of long prison terms if they don’t cooperate. And if the example of the Wikileaks case is any guide, it’s only a matter of time before members start turning on each other in response to the pressure.

The story notes that Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private currently residing in a 6-by-12-foot cell at the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, was turned in by the hacker Adrian Lamo. Even so, for now LulzSec is showing no sign of losing even a bit of its public swagger, as you can read in the tweet and statement embedded below.

Nobody arrested, no significant logs leaked, website up, twitter up, Pirate Bay account up, IRC up, Lulz Boat sailing… victory for us. :D

June 6, 2011 10:14 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@LulzSec

The Lulz Boat

The accounts in question belong to Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic lawmaker who assisted with WikiLeaks’ release of a U.S. military video that had been classified; Jacob Applebaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer based in Seattle; and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen who is co-founder of the Internet service provider XS4ALL.

The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia had filed an order in December seeking IP address and other Twitter account information relating to several users connected to WikiLeaks, including its head, Julian Assange.

Buchanan turned away arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and private attorneys saying that the privacy of their accounts were protected by established federal law and the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment.

Twitter account holders have “no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses,” Buchanan said, and federal privacy law was not relevant because prosecutors weren’t seeking the contents of the communications and, aside from direct messages, their tweets are public already anyway.

Twitter said in a statement that its policy is “designed to allow users to defend their own rights,” and that it will “let the judicial process run its course.” An appeal to a higher court is expected.

This case emerged in January, when Twitter notified several users that federal prosecutors had obtained a court order for their account information.

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.”

Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming.

Luckily, Clinton’s speech–the latest chapter of the Obama administration’s “Internet Freedom Agenda”–was much better.

In fact, it was a sobering look at the situation, replete with all its conflicts and compromises, including some related to the State Department of late (hello, WikiLeaks!).

While more of a gimmick, Clinton outlined what she called a “venture capital-style approach” to stopping governments from closing down digital communications platforms.

In Egypt, that has included the whole dang Internet after times got tough and protesters tweeted too much.

Even still, said Clinton, such efforts–however effective now–were ultimately useless.

“Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever,” she said.

Still, even though Facebook and Twitter have been lauded as critical tools in the reform protests in the Mideast, those Luddite strongmen did manage to put up a very good fight in shutting them down.

But Clinton advocated pressing on. Along with the seed funding for firewall-piercing and evading technologies, she also announced the creation of a new coordinator for cyber issues and the fact that the State Department had just begun to tweet in Arabic and Farsi and would soon be doing so in Chinese, Hindi and Russian.

All very nice steps, but the overall arrival of the long-promised global “strategy for cyberspace,” which has gotten bogged down in politics, is still to come.

In fact, a GOP-fueled criticism of the State Department was also released yesterday, designed to muck up Clinton’s speech, about how another $30 million in digital investments was being spent or, more precisely, being spent badly.

Clinton answered critics:

“Some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology–but there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no ‘app’ for that.”

Well, actually, since there is an app that turns your Apple iPhone into a hand massager, there certainly should be.

Speaking of that, Clinton was deft at dealing with the obvious delta between pressing for Internet freedom, even as U.S. government lawyers were whacking away at WikiLeaks–and, by association, Twitter itself.

Clinton noted the release of a mass of classified State Department documents “began with an act of theft,” arguing that this was the real issue.

She went on to further argue:

“I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.”

Actually, the issue is that the Internet, once it really gets going, doesn’t really want to be controlled by anyone.

Kind of like humanity.

Or as Clinton so correctly noted about the various protests taking place abroad:

“In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did.”

In any case, judge for yourself: Here’s the video of the speech at George Washington University from the State Department’s Web site, as well as the full text below:

Thank you all very much and good afternoon. It is a pleasure, once again, to be back on the campus of the George Washington University, a place that I have spent quite a bit of time in all different settings over the last now nearly 20 years. I’d like especially to thank President Knapp and Provost Lerman, because this is a great opportunity for me to address such a significant issue, and one which deserves the attention of citizens, governments, and I know is drawing that attention. And perhaps today in my remarks, we can begin a much more vigorous debate that will respond to the needs that we have been watching in real time on our television sets.

A few minutes after midnight on January 28th, the Internet went dark across Egypt. During the previous four days, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had marched to demand a new government. And the world, on TVs, laptops, cell phones, and smart phones, had followed every single step. Pictures and videos from Egypt flooded the web. On Facebook and Twitter, journalists posted on-the-spot reports. Protestors coordinated their next moves. And citizens of all stripes shared their hopes and fears about this pivotal moment in the history of their country.

Millions worldwide answered in real time, “You are not alone and we are with you.” Then the government pulled the plug. Cell phone service was cut off, TV satellite signals were jammed, and Internet access was blocked for nearly the entire population. The government did not want the people to communicate with each other and it did not want the press to communicate with the public. It certainly did not want the world to watch.

The events in Egypt recalled another protest movement 18 months earlier in Iran, when thousands marched after disputed elections. Their protestors also used websites to organize. A video taken by cell phone showed a young woman named Neda killed by a member of the paramilitary forces, and within hours, that video was being watched by people everywhere.

The Iranian authorities used technology as well. The Revolutionary Guard stalked members of the Green Movement by tracking their online profiles. And like Egypt, for a time, the government shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. After the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended.

In Egypt, however, the story ended differently. The protests continued despite the internet shutdown. People organized marches through flyers and word of mouth and used dial-up modems and fax machines to communicate with the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt came back online. The authorities then sought to use the Internet to control the protests by ordering mobile companies to send out pro-government text messages, and by arresting bloggers and those who organized the protests online. But 18 days after the protests began, the government failed and the president resigned.

What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet. In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

So it is our values that cause these actions to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it. And it is these values that ought to drive us to think about the road ahead. Two billion people are now online, nearly a third of humankind. We hail from every corner of the world, live under every form of government, and subscribe to every system of beliefs. And increasingly, we are turning to the Internet to conduct important aspects of our lives.

The Internet has become the public space of the 21st century–the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an Internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the Internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the Internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to Internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs–these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the Internet. And because the Internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

In the year since my speech, people worldwide have continued to use the Internet to solve shared problems and expose public corruption, from the people in Russia who tracked wildfires online and organized a volunteer firefighting squad, to the children in Syria who used Facebook to reveal abuse by their teachers, to the Internet campaign in China that helps parents find their missing children.

At the same time, the Internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

These actions reflect a landscape that is complex and combustible, and sure to become more so in the coming years as billions of more people connect to the Internet. The choices we make today will determine what the Internet looks like in the future. Businesses have to choose whether and how to enter markets where internet freedom is limited. People have to choose how to act online, what information to share and with whom, which ideas to voice and how to voice them. Governments have to choose to live up to their commitments to protect free expression, assembly, and association.

For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.

And today, I’d like to discuss several of the challenges we must confront as we seek to protect and defend a free and open Internet. Now, I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Liberty and security are often presented as equal and opposite; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact, I believe they make it each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them.

Finding this proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress–its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed–also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.

So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the Internet’s greatest attribute. The United States is aggressively tracking and deterring criminals and terrorists online. We are investing in our nation’s cyber-security, both to prevent cyber-incidents and to lessen their impact. We are cooperating with other countries to fight transnational crime in cyberspace. The United States Government invests in helping other nations build their own law enforcement capacity. We have also ratified the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, which sets out the steps countries must take to ensure that the internet is not misused by criminals and terrorists while still protecting the liberties of our own citizens.

In our vigorous effort to prevent attacks or apprehend criminals, we retain a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is determined to stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we are committed to pursuing these goals in accordance with our laws and values.

Now, others have taken a different approach. Security is often invoked as a justification for harsh crackdowns on freedom. Now, this tactic is not new to the digital age, but it has new resonance as the internet has given governments new capacities for tracking and punishing human rights advocates and political dissidents. Governments that arrest bloggers, pry into the peaceful activities of their citizens, and limit their access to the Internet may claim to be seeking security. In fact, they may even mean it as they define it. But they are taking the wrong path. Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever.

The second challenge is protecting both transparency and confidentiality. The Internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the Internet is also a channel for private communications. And for that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online. Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential to protect them from exposure or retribution. And governments also rely on confidential communication online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not alter the need for it.

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes. Or consider the content of the documents that WikiLeaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by WikiLeaks relate to human rights work carried on around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It is dangerous work. By publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the Internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke. But of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public, and we must review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws designed to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people, and the Obama Administration has also launched an unprecedented initiative to put government data online, to encourage citizen participation, and to generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests. Let me be clear. I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.

And one final word on this matter: There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

A third challenge is protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility. I don’t need to tell this audience that the Internet is home to every kind of speech–false, offensive, incendiary, innovative, truthful, and beautiful.

The multitude of opinions and ideas that crowd the Internet is both a result of its openness and a reflection of our human diversity. Online, everyone has a voice. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom of expression for all. But what we say has consequences. Hateful or defamatory words can inflame hostilities, deepen divisions, and provoke violence. On the Internet, this power is heightened. Intolerant speech is often amplified and impossible to retract. Of course, the Internet also provides a unique space for people to bridge their differences and build trust and understanding.

Some take the view that, to encourage tolerance, some hateful ideas must be silenced by governments. We believe that efforts to curb the content of speech rarely succeed and often become an excuse to violate freedom of expression. Instead, as it has historically been proven time and time again, the better answer to offensive speech is more speech. People can and should speak out against intolerance and hatred. By exposing ideas to debate, those with merit tend to be strengthened, while weak and false ideas tend to fade away; perhaps not instantly, but eventually.

Now, this approach does not immediately discredit every hateful idea or convince every bigot to reverse his thinking. But we have determined as a society that it is far more effective than any other alternative approach. Deleting writing, blocking content, arresting speakers–these actions suppress words, but they do not touch the underlying ideas. They simply drive people with those ideas to the fringes, where their convictions can deepen, unchallenged.

Last summer, Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, made a trip to Dachau and Auschwitz with a delegation of American imams and Muslim leaders. Many of them had previously denied the Holocaust, and none of them had ever denounced Holocaust denial. But by visiting the concentration camps, they displayed a willingness to consider a different view. And the trip had a real impact. They prayed together, and they signed messages of peace, and many of those messages in the visitors books were written in Arabic. At the end of the trip, they read a statement that they wrote and signed together condemning without reservation Holocaust denial and all other forms of anti-Semitism.

The marketplace of ideas worked. Now, these leaders had not been arrested for their previous stance or ordered to remain silent. Their mosques were not shut down. The state did not compel them with force. Others appealed to them with facts. And their speech was dealt with through the speech of others.

The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive. History, after all, is full of examples of ideas that were banned for reasons that we now see as wrong. People were punished for denying the divine right of kings, or suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, or religion. These restrictions might have reflected the dominant view at the time, and variations on these restrictions are still in force in places around the world.

But when it comes to online speech, the United States has chosen not to depart from our time-tested principles. We urge our people to speak with civility, to recognize the power and reach that their words can have online. We’ve seen in our own country tragic examples of how online bullying can have terrible consequences. Those of us in government should lead by example, in the tone we set and the ideas we champion. But leadership also means empowering people to make their own choices, rather than intervening and taking those choices away. We protect free speech with the force of law, and we appeal to the force of reason to win out over hate.

Now, these three large principles are not always easy to advance at once. They raise tensions, and they pose challenges. But we do not have to choose among them. Liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, freedom of expression and tolerance–these all make up the foundation of a free, open, and secure society as well as a free, open, and secure internet where universal human rights are respected, and which provides a space for greater progress and prosperity over the long run.

Now, some countries are trying a different approach, abridging rights online and working to erect permanent walls between different activities–economic exchanges, political discussions, religious expressions, and social interactions. They want to keep what they like and suppress what they don’t. But this is no easy task. Search engines connect businesses to new customers, and they also attract users because they deliver and organize news and information. Social networking sites aren’t only places where friends share photos; they also share political views and build support for social causes or reach out to professional contacts to collaborate on new business opportunities.

Walls that divide the Internet, that block political content, or ban broad categories of expression, or allow certain forms of peaceful assembly but prohibit others, or intimidate people from expressing their ideas are far easier to erect than to maintain. Not just because people using human ingenuity find ways around them and through them but because there isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet; there’s just the Internet. And maintaining barriers that attempt to change this reality entails a variety of costs–moral, political, and economic. Countries may be able to absorb these costs for a time, but we believe they are unsustainable in the long run. There are opportunity costs for trying to be open for business but closed for free expression–costs to a nation’s education system, its political stability, its social mobility, and its economic potential.

When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free inquiry that spurs people to question old ways of doing and invent new ones. And barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which create economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.

So it;s not surprising that the European-American Business Council, a group of more than 70 companies, made a strong public support statement last week for Internet freedom. If you invest in countries with aggressive censorship and surveillance policies, your website could be shut down without warning, your servers hacked by the government, your designs stolen, or your staff threatened with arrest or expulsion for failing to comply with a politically motivated order. The risks to your bottom line and to your integrity will at some point outweigh the potential rewards, especially if there are market opportunities elsewhere.

Now, some have pointed to a few countries, particularly China, that appears to stand out as an exception, a place where Internet censorship is high and economic growth is strong. Clearly, many businesses are willing to endure restrictive internet policies to gain access to those markets, and in the short term, even perhaps in the medium term, those governments may succeed in maintaining a segmented internet. But those restrictions will have long-term costs that threaten one day to become a noose that restrains growth and development.

There are political costs as well. Consider Tunisia, where online economic activity was an important part of the country’s ties with Europe while online censorship was on par with China and Iran, the effort to divide the economic internet from the “everything else” Internet in Tunisia could not be sustained. People, especially young people, found ways to use connection technologies to organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change. In Syria, too, the government is trying to negotiate a non-negotiable contradiction. Just last week, it lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube for the first time in three years, and yesterday they convicted a teenage girl of espionage and sentenced her to five years in prison for the political opinions she expressed on her blog.

This, too, is unsustainable. The demand for access to platforms of expression cannot be satisfied when using them lands you in prison. We believe that governments who have erected barriers to Internet freedom, whether they’re technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in. They will face a dictator’s dilemma and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked and people who have been disappeared.

I urge countries everywhere instead to join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries. At its core, it’s an extension of the bet that the United States has been making for more than 200 years, that open societies give rise to the most lasting progress, that the rule of law is the firmest foundation for justice and peace, and that innovation thrives where ideas of all kinds are aired and explored. This is not a bet on computers or mobile phones. It’s a bet on people. We’re confident that together with those partners in government and people around the world who are making the same bet by hewing to universal rights that underpin open societies, we’ll preserve the internet as an open space for all. And that will pay long-term gains for our shared progress and prosperity. The United States will continue to promote an Internet where people’s rights are protected and that it is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work.

In the past year, we have welcomed the emergence of a global coalition of countries, businesses, civil society groups, and digital activists seeking to advance these goals. We have found strong partners in several governments worldwide, and we’ve been encouraged by the work of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together companies, academics, and NGOs to work together to solve the challenges we are facing, like how to handle government requests for censorship or how to decide whether to sell technologies that could be used to violate rights or how to handle privacy issues in the context of cloud computing. We need strong corporate partners that have made principled, meaningful commitments to internet freedom as we work together to advance this common cause.

We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real-world activism. That’s why we are working through our Civil Society 2.0 initiative to connect NGOs and advocates with technology and training that will magnify their impact. We are also committed to continuing our conversation with people everywhere around the world. Last week, you may have heard, we launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, adding to the ones we already have in French and Spanish. We’ll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block.

Our commitment to internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions. Monitoring and responding to threats to internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There’s no app for that. Start working, those of you out there. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn gave a speech on this issue just yesterday. All these efforts build on a decade of work to sustain an Internet that is open, secure, and reliable. And in the coming year, the Administration will complete an international strategy for cyberspace, charting the course to continue this work into the future.

This is a foreign policy priority for us, one that will only increase in importance in the coming years. That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.

The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.

So we are playing for the long game. Unlike much of what happens online, progress on this front will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security, and prosperity of an open Internet.

As we look ahead, let us remember that Internet freedom isn’t about any one particular activity online. It’s about ensuring that the Internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.

We want to keep the Iternet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the Internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world.

Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.

Thank you all very much.

Mrs. Clinton made her second major address on the Internet Tuesday and particularly cited the recent leaking of thousands of secret State Department cables by the Web site WikiLeaks as the type of abuses that need to be guarded against. She stressed that nations need to agree on common legal platforms to ensure the Internet isn’t used for theft, espionage and political repression.

But the former first lady hailed the role that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have played in organizing a recent wave of political protests that have targeted dictatorial regimes in the Middle East.

“Finding the proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the Internet a force for unprecedented progress—its openness, its level effect, its reach and speed—also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale,” Mrs. Clinton told a gathering at George Washington University.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The five range in age from 15 to 26 and were arrested in early-morning raids on their homes. They’re accused of being involved in distributed denial-of-service attacks, where groups of users flood a Web site with more traffic than it can handle, thus slowing its performance to a crawl.

!n 2010 the group claimed responsibility for attacks on several Web sites, in apparent sympathy with WikiLeaks–the secret-exposing site that last year unleashed a barrage of previously confidential U.S. diplomatic cables. Targets of Anonymous included the Web sites of PayPal, Mastercard and Visa Europe after those companies stopped financial contributions from going to accounts belonging to the WikiLeaks organization. The action was dubbed “Operation Payback.” The police declined to say which attacks the five arrested are alleged to have taken part in.

Amazon was thought at one point to have been a target when its service went down briefly in December at a moment that coincided with chatter that Anonymous wanted to attack it. The company later said it had suffered a brief hardware problem.

Calling Anonymous a group is a bit misleading. Most of the people who chose to participate in one of its attacks did so by downloading software to their computers called the Low Orbit Ion Canon. Attacks were organized on the channels of Internet Relay Chat, and coordinated orders for all participants to “fire” their weapons were issued on Twitter. The software running on each desktop would then simulate legitimate Web requests to the target site, inundating it with so many requests that it would be overwhelmed and effectively rendered useless.

Earlier this month the group had trained its sights on Web sites belonging to the government of Tunisia, following civil unrest there, and just yesterday it was said to be attacking sites in Egypt.

This is the second round of arrests related to the attacks. Two teenagers in the Netherlands have also been arrested–one said to be connected to the attacks on Visa and Mastercard, the other allegedly involved in an attack on the Web site belonging to a Swedish prosecutor investigating sexual assault charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

And speaking of Assange, CBS just announced that he’ll be interviewed by Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” this Sunday. Here’s hoping that prompts a new Assange sketch from “Saturday Night Live,” like the one below from December.

Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101230/2010-was-the-year-the-internet-got-scary-get-used-to-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20101230/2010-was-the-year-the-internet-got-scary-get-used-to-it/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:00:46 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1112

I can’t remember a year during which computer security stories jumped so readily from the tech and business pages to the front page.

The year 2010 was bookended by two such cases. It opened with Google’s disclosure that it had come under attack in China, an apparent attempt to penetrate the Gmail accounts of certain activists and journalists.

It ended with the WikiLeaks affair, which stemmed from the alleged theft by an Army private of classified documents stored on a government network.

And let’s not forget in mid-year came the story, as fascinating as it was sobering, of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by parties unknown–although the smart money is on Israel–that penetrated and ultimately damaged equipment used in the Iranian nuclear program.

Computer hacking–which has for too long evoked images in the public mind-set of teenagers in basements taking digital joyrides–has finally revealed itself to everyone for what it has long been for those in the know: The domain of espionage, sabotage and possibly warfare.

In Google’s case, the attacks upon its systems raised questions about where it draws the line with authorities in Beijing about such matters as freedom of speech. When the attack was first disclosed, Google publicly mulled shutting down its operations in China.

Then in protest, it stopped censoring its search results, giving mainland Chinese access to the same search results available to residents of Hong Kong. Beijing responded by blocking access to Google’s site.

Finally, Google and China came to a new agreement, and Google appeared the loser in the battle of wills.

Computer security is one of those things that companies and governments say they take seriously, but never really seem to get a grip on, judging by the results.

In any case, there is no firewall or software in existence that could have prevented Bradley Manning from stealing the documents that he is alleged to have given to WikiLeaks. As a low-level Army intelligence analyst, he was a trusted insider who had access to this material in the course of his day-to-day job.

So, it was not technology that failed. The failure was one of internal policies that allowed him access to data not relevant to his position.

Any employee of a midsize company can see how wrong that is. Human-resources documents are limited only to those who work in that department. The same is true of people who work in the legal office, business development department and so on.

But it apparently didn’t occur to anyone in government to limit the access to what became the WikiLeaks cache to people who worked only for or closely with the State Department.

If it turns out that thousands of companies are better at protecting their business secrets than the U.S. government is, then it’s not for nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency task force investigating the WikiLeaks affair bears the initials “WTF.”

Something similar was true of Stuxnet. One of the reasons the attackers, whoever they are, succeeded was that they used several so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities in Windows.

These are undocumented weaknesses that hackers save up for special occasions as a way to open a back door into a computer and then insert a troublemaking payload, like a worm. Zero day exploits are a fact of life, and once spotted in the world, they’re usually patched.

The Stuxnet attackers used as many as four zero day exploits as a way to get their worm into targeted computers. Microsoft, to its credit, made short work of fixing them once they came to light.

Even so, the Stuxnet worm burrowed its way from Windows machines into industrial control computers known as SCADA systems, which are widely used to run factories, power plants, pipelines and all sorts of other infrastructure essential to modern life.

The worm was designed to find a specific target: The systems controlling a set of as many as 1,000 centrifuges at the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, and make them spin faster than they were supposed to.

The ability to attack industrial computers and cause them to do things they’re not supposed to do has been a lingering fear among security experts for years. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy in 2007 looked at the potential for attacks on SCADA systems and proved that it was possible to seize control of an electrical generator and then make it destroy itself.

They also found that many of these systems are connected to the Internet for what seem like good reasons: Convenience and cost savings. But these connections have also opened them up to the same kind of attacks that rattled the Iranian facility in Natanz.

Another Stuxnet-like worm, the thinking goes, could be used to bring down a power grid, or poison drinking water, or shut down an oil or gas pipeline. The good news is that such an attack is expensive–Stuxnet, by one estimate, cost $10 million to create–and requires a lot of specialized insider knowledge.

The bad news is that the Stuxnet source code is circulating in the wild for anyone to study. And as the WikiLeaks case shows, there are often insiders willing to take part in criminal schemes.

The other bad news? Securing these systems won’t come cheap.

If history is any judge, there will likely be a barrage of computer security companies that try to spin these incidents into opportunities to make a sales pitch. That’s what security companies do, after all.

But they usually miss the point. How can you plan for a vulnerability you’ve never seen? How can you stop an otherwise trusted insider from abusing their access to sensitive information? Both are fundamentally difficult problems for which there are no easy answers.

Spending money on last year’s security vulnerabilities is like preparing to fight the last war: Circumstances inevitably change, and they certainly will in 2011. New kinds of attacks will arise, and they will catch their targets by surprise.

And the public, like the CIA, will reasonably ask, “WTF?”

The unvarnished fact is that the networked society to which we’ve become accustomed in the last several years has a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

And the more we rely upon it, the more people with a combination of advanced technical skills and repugnant motivations are going to look for ways to turn it against us.

Some will do so as a means of making a personal profit. Others may see it as a way of advancing a political or ideological agenda.

But others will want to use theirs skills to do serious harm to innocent people on a large scale.

And the events of 2010 point the way to a world where that’s a more realistic scenario than it ever was before.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101230/2010-was-the-year-the-internet-got-scary-get-used-to-it/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101228/mcafee-releases-annual-top-scary-reasons-to-buy-our-software-list/ http://allthingsd.com/20101228/mcafee-releases-annual-top-scary-reasons-to-buy-our-software-list/#comments Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:33:16 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34421 Security outfit McAfee today unveiled its 2011 Threat Predictions report, and sure enough, the biggest threats are aimed at “2010′s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals.” Another in a long list of non-shocking (but still sobering) predictions: “Politically motivated attacks will be on the rise, as more groups are expected to repeat the WikiLeaks paradigm.” The report’s bottom line: Anything you do online carries risks. Which is undeniably true.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101228/mcafee-releases-annual-top-scary-reasons-to-buy-our-software-list/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:13:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1010 It’s now been at least 10 days since the Gawker group of Web sites was hacked by a group calling itself Gnosis in one of the side threads to the WikiLeaks controversy.

Within two days, sites like LinkedIn and later Blizzard Entertainment and Yahoo had advised their users to change their passwords.

The latest company caught up in all this is the New York Times. A little more than an hour ago, the Times sent an email to customers (see below) whose email addresses appeared in a searchable database of compromised Gawker commenting accounts, warning them that if they used the same password on nytimes.com as they did on Gawker, it would be a good idea to change it. There is no evidence of any funny business on the Times’ Web site.

Incidentally, in case you missed it, Gawker’s technology head, Thomas Plunkett, circulated a memo detailing what happened at Gawker and what it plans to do in response to the incident. One thing it will do is offer disposable commenting accounts that users can ditch easily, and for which storing an email address won’t be required.

Here is the email from the Times:

NYTimes.com Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM
Reply-To: nytdirect@nytimes.com

In case you missed our recent article “Gawker Sites Hacked and Passwords Compromised”
http://nyti.ms/hjNvlY we are writing to inform you that databases belonging to Gawker Media were compromised and hackers obtained more than one million user names, e-mail addresses and passwords.

While there is no evidence of suspicious activity on NYTimes.com we wanted you to know that
the e-mail address you registered with NYTimes.com matches an e-mail address that was on
the list of Gawker e-mail addresses and passwords that were published online.

If you use the same password for NYTimes.com as you did for Gawker, we strongly recommend you change your password. Changing your NYTimes.com password can be accomplished by visiting the Member Center page: http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter. After logging in to your account, click on the ‘change’ button associated with the password field which can be found under the Account Summary heading.

Here’s a Gadgetwise post with tips on developing a good password (in brief: do not make it a real word, keep it long and mix in an unusual combination of letters and numbers).
http://nyti.ms/gGR3kz

Please contact Customer Support at 1-800-698-4637 or e-mail customercare@nytimes.com with any questions.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/wikileaks-app-removed-by-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/wikileaks-app-removed-by-apple/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:15:43 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34229 Today, Apple confirmed to the New York Times that it removed a WikiLeaks app from its App Store on Monday. The $1.99 app, which had been available for just three days, allowed iPhone and iPad users to read WikiLeaks content and follow its Twitter stream. According to Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller, the app was removed “because it violated our developer guidelines,” which stipulate that “apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/wikileaks-app-removed-by-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/man-i-got-so-wikileaked-last-night/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/man-i-got-so-wikileaked-last-night/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:23:29 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34204 “WikiLeaks” has entered the canon of the English language, but not according to the OED. Research done by a group known as Global Language Monitor shows that “WikiLeaks” has appeared in global media more than 300 million times since 2006. The Texas-based group cites a minimum of 25,000 mentions in English-speaking media as a requirement for the name to become its own lowercase, generic word. Unfortunately, GLM doesn’t specify its definition or whether the word would be used as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/man-i-got-so-wikileaked-last-night/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/viral-video-julian-assange-is-a-samantha-but-a-charlotte-to-the-swedish-police/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/viral-video-julian-assange-is-a-samantha-but-a-charlotte-to-the-swedish-police/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:15:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38785 BoomTown was deep in meetings at the Dow Jones mother ship in New York yesterday with more suits than you can find at Barneys, so I failed to get up this latest Julian Assange spoof from “Saturday Night Live.”

Here the WikiLeaks leader comments on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently beating him out for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The faux Assange is not happy that social networking beat out classified documents.

This skit–the third so far–seems to be getting funnier each time:

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