Month: November 2013

A Free Webinar on Crowdsourcing Dispute Resolution

November 11, 2013 Administrator Leave a comment Webinar

Can You Help Me Now?

A Free Webinar on

Crowdsourcing Dispute Resolution

Over Mobile Devices

Wednesday November 20th, 2013

9am PST

Join Colin Rule, founder and current Chairman and COO of Modria.com and Chittu Nagarajan, creator and co-founder of ODRworld and ODRindia, to discuss their chapter, Crowdsourcing Dispute Resolution Over Mobile Devices, from the book “Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management,” edited by Marta Poblet.

This webinar is brought to you by CIJT and Marta Poblet as the first in a series of webinars by the authors of the seminal book, Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management, available for purchase here. Don’t miss this opportunity to interact with the authors live, ask questions and hear the latest developments in this cutting-edge field within conflict management.

If you’d like to ask the presenters a question, feel free to post to our forum at http://forum.thecenter.org/

All questions asked before 11/22 will be answered.

Antigua to Get Free U.S. Copyrights?

November 11, 2013 Administrator Leave a comment Trade

Antigua preparing to move forward with WTO authorized rejection of US copyrights (Patently-O, 31 Oct 2013) – Over the past several decades, the US has been at the forefront of pushing through low international trade barriers and strong intellectual property rights. The current scheme is organized through the World Trade Organization and the vast majority of nations have signed-on as members. The WTO has a dispute resolution mechanism that allows one country to bring another country to task for failing to abide by their trade-related promises. Most of these cases involve either import restrictions placed on certain goods or the “dumping” of goods. Since around 2003, the US has taken fairly effective measures to destabilize the market for cross-border gambling and betting services. In response to those measures, the country of Antigua and Barbuda filed a WTO dispute complaining that the US action was a trade violation and, the WTO panel agreed with Antigua. The particular findings are that “three US federal laws (the Wire Act, the Travel Act and the Illegal Gambling Business Act) and the provisions of four US state laws (those of Louisiana, Massachusetts, South Dakota and Utah) on their face, prohibit … cross-border supply … contrary to the United States’ specific market access commitments for gambling and betting services.” [ Link ] The penalty for a WTO violation typically involves the WTO allowing counter-measures by the injured party – typically their own import quota or restriction. In countries with a strong domestic industry, the import quota can provide a strong, be it temporary, boost. However, those quotas also injure local consumers who typically pay more for lower quality goods or services. Antigua’s particular situation is also unique because the country does not have much of any domestic industry beyond tourism (including Gambling). As such, a typical quota does not make sense as a penalty against the US. At the end of the day, the WTO authorized Antigua to suspend its TRIPs obligations with respect to U.S. intellectual property at a cost to the US. Antigua is now rapidly moving forward with a monetization scheme that would essentially create a local market for copyrighted work owned by U.S. entities, but where no royalties are paid to the U.S. copyright holders. Antiguan legislation is expected in the upcoming weeks followed by bids from private contractors to build-out the online marketplace.

Provided by MIRLN.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.

Prosecutors Acknowledging Warrantless Wiretaps

November 4, 2013 Administrator Leave a comment Criminal Law

Federal prosecutors, in a policy shift, cite warrantless wiretaps as evidence (NYT, 26 Oct 2013) – The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional. Prosecutors filed such a notice late Friday in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, who was charged in Colorado in January 2012 with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a designated terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan. Mr. Muhtorov is accused of planning to travel abroad to join the militants and has pleaded not guilty. A criminal complaint against him showed that much of the government’s case was based on intercepted e-mails and phone calls. The government’s notice allows Mr. Muhtorov’s lawyer to ask a court to suppress the evidence by arguing that it derived from unconstitutional surveillance, setting in motion judicial review of the eavesdropping. The New York Times reported on Oct. 17 that the decision by prosecutors to notify a defendant about the wiretapping followed a legal policy debate inside the Justice Department. The debate began in June when Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. discovered that the department’s National Security Division did not notify criminal defendants when eavesdropping without a warrant was an early link in an investigative chain that led to evidence used in court. As a result, none of the defendants knew that they had the right to challenge the warrantless wiretapping law. The practice contradicted what Mr. Verrilli had told the Supreme Court last year in a case challenging the law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

Provided by MIRLN.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/winnond.

VPNs and Security Awareness: The New Reality

November 2, 2013 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

How one small American VPN company is trying to stand up for privacy (ArsTechnica, 27 Oct 2013) – In recent months, I’ve started to take my own digital security much more seriously. I encrypt my e-mail when possible, I’ve moved away from Gmail , and I’ve become much more vigilant about using a VPN nearly all the time. Just as cryptographers and security researchers are auditing tools like TrueCrypt , I’ve started to kick the tires of the products that I rely upon on a daily basis. When I lived in Germany between 2010 and 2012, my wife and I paid $40 a year for a commercial VPN so we could continue to watch Hulu. But upon our return stateside, I kept paying for it anyway, for privacy-minded reasons. There are lots of VPNs out there, but the one I use isPrivate Internet Access (PIA). Why PIA? No particular reason, really. I don’t remember exactly how I came to choose it, but I remember seeing it in a roundup of VPNs listed on TorrentFreak . I now use PIA nearly every day, almost all the time, and that got me wondering: how does the company respond to real-world legal requests? Has it ever been compelled to hand over user data? Were those users ever notified? Unfortunately, Private Internet Access’ website doesn’t really make clear who is behind its site. The site’s footer points to London Trust Media , which also provides nothing more than an e-mail address. A little searching led me to find, and then get in touch with, the CEO of London Trust Media, Andrew Lee-one of the firm’s two owners. Lee has a background in the world of Bitcoin (he was one of the original founders of Mt. Gox), but he has had an interest in online privacy for years. PIA has been around since August 2009. Today, it has around 100,000 users. One of PIA’s biggest selling points (like other VPN providers) is that it does not log anything, and thus has little data to actually hand over to law enforcement. “We’ve never been asked for keys, nor [have we] handed over user data,” Lee told Ars. “What happens is that if anybody asks us for information, first and foremost, we confirm that they are a legit agency or government body that has any jurisdiction to even attempt to ask for that data. Then we go through and see that that complies with the letter and the spirit of the law. We don’t have any logs whatsoever. We don’t log metadata [or] session data either. We will comply with anything, but we can’t comply because we do not provide any logs. We don’t log, period.” Of course, one of the biggest problems is that there’s essentially no way for me to verify PIA’s (or anyone else’s) practices. Lots of VPN firms claim not to log, and I’d like to believe them, but there’s really no way for me to know for sure that Lee can’t see that I’m loading Ars about 100 times a day. Lee also told me that his firm has spoken with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other related groups to try to come up with a third-party audit system that would attempt to alleviate this exact problem. That way, ordinary consumers like me would at least have a little bit more of a reason to trust that no logs are being kept. “You have to trust the VPN-they have access to your data,” Dan Auerbach of the EFF told Ars. “Even if they’re really good, the government can come in and say we have a warrant… You have to take it on faith that there will be no CALEA -type orders, [where] the government will come in and say you have to come in and do logging. This is the reason that Tor was developed, was that people realized that we want some sort of anonymity service that doesn’t require you to trust just one party. That’s the basic problem with VPNs.” * * *

Vince Polley : This continues, with interesting discussion about legal issues, including possible use of a “ warrant canary ”. For many of the reasons stated in this story, I’ve decided to cancel my VPN account with GetCloak.com; it comes down to my inability to trust any third-party service provider that might log, or steal, my traffic. I’d suggested to GetCloak that they make public security promises that might be enforceable by the FTC, but even those might not be sufficient to enable me to use my financial log-in credentials over their network. So, I’m back to using AT&T, via my iPhone tethering, to secure my sensitive traffic, notwithstanding NSA interception. Better the NSA than somebody I don’t know and really cannot trust.]

Provided by MIRLN.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/ddpavumba.