Author: David Kravets

Eleven Pacific Rim nations and the US agreed Monday to the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership pact—a secret trade accord backed by nations from Australia to Vietnam.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “The TPP contains a chapter on intellectual property covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. Since the draft text of the agreement has never been officially released to the public, we know from leaked documents, such as the May 2014 [PDF] draft of the TPP Intellectual Property Chapter [PDF], that US negotiators are pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) [PDF].”

Negotiating nations include the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. Combined, the nations represent about 40 percent of the global economy. The secret accord took more than five years to produce and must be approved by the US Congress. In all, there are 30 chapters, and they won’t be made public for at least a month. Negotiating nations thought it would be better to bargain in secret than in public. There have been leaks, but the citizens of the countries negotiating the pact have deliberately been kept in the dark about it.

US authorities want to put RFID chips in driver’s licenses for the stated goal of speeding up US border-crossing lines in Mexico and Canada. Privacy experts caution that these spy-friendly forms of ID likely will evolve into something more nefarious. Pictured above: Border crossing from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Ysidro, California. (credit: Richard Masoner)

Radio frequency identification chips are everywhere—in passports, library and payment cards, school ID cards, and even in NFL players’ uniforms.

So why not put RFID chips in driver’s licenses? California Gov. Jerry Brown has a bill awaiting his veto or signature that would do just that. The states of Washington, New York, Michigan, and Vermont already have adopted the spy-friendly, voluntary program that links your license with the Department of Homeland Security. For the moment, the cards are designed to be used instead of passports at US land borders in a bid to speed up the entrance lines from Mexico and Canada.

But the more states that sign on, the more likely such cards could become mandatory across the country. That’s why privacy advocates are urging the governor to veto the measure. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, is decrying the move to RFID chips in driver’s licenses as a “civil liberties nightmare.”

(credit: Rachel Johnson)

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) says security researchers tinkering with vehicle software shouldn’t be allowed to go public with their findings. The agency “is concerned that there may be circumstances in which security researchers may not fully appreciate the potential safety ramifications” if their findings are released in the wild.

That’s according to a DOT letter (PDF) to federal IP regulators who are considering a proposal to allow the public to circumvent copyright protection measures attached to vehicle software. Known as “technological protection measures” (TPMs), automakers employ this type of copyright scheme in a bid to make it a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation to examine or tinker with the code in onboard vehicle software.

The debate over whether vehicle owners have a right to tinker with the software on their vehicles—just like they have the right to change their own oil—comes amid a growing and global in-vehicle software scandal at Volkswagen. And it comes as the US Copyright Office is considering a proposal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others that would authorize such tinkering without chilling researchers’ speech.

(credit: James Marvin Phelps)

The Justice Department is set to argue Wednesday before a federal appeals court that it may prosecute people for crimes based on evidence obtained from their computers—evidence that was outside the scope of an original probable-cause search warrant.

That’s a big deal in today’s digital age. Society has evolved to the point that many people keep all of their papers and effects co-mingled on their computer hard drives.

The highly nuanced legal dispute initially seems innocent enough. It concerns an accountant’s tax evasion conviction and two-year prison sentence in 2012 that was based on a court-authorized search and imaging of his computer files. Stavros Ganias’ files were copied as part of an Army overbilling investigation into one of his clients. Holding on to the imaged files for nearly three years, Connecticut authorities discovered fresh evidence unrelated to the initial search of the files and got new search warrants to investigate more of the accountant’s mirrored files that were already in the government’s possession. All the while, Ganias had subsequently deleted those files from his hard drives after the government had imaged them, according to court records.

The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination would be breached if two insider trading suspects were forced to turn over the passcodes of their locked mobile phones to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

(credit: David Kravets)

“We find, as the SEC is not seeking business records but Defendants’ personal thought processes, Defendants may properly invoke their Fifth Amendment right,” US District Judge Mark Kearney of Pennsylvania wrote.

The decision comes amid a growing global debate about encryption and whether the tech sector should build backdoors into their wares to grant the authorities access to locked devices. Ars reported today that an Obama administration working group “considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow government investigators to decipher encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals.”

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment is required for the police to obtain a suspect’s cell-site data.

The decision by the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals gives the Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the issue, ammunition to resolve a modern-day privacy controversy affecting the tens of millions of American mobile phone users. Until Wednesday, all the federal appellate courts that have decided the issue have ruled for the government’s proposition that cell-site records are not constitutionally protected.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) analyst Jeremy Malcolm and EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said the content industry wants “new tools to discover the identities of website owners whom they want to accuse of copyright and trademark infringement, preferably without a court order.”

ICANN is accepting comments on the proposal until July 7. Comments can be e-mailed to: comments-ppsai-initial-05may15@icann.org.

Lawmakers in the US Senate introduced legislation Wednesday that would require federal authorities to get a probable-cause warrant from a judge to surveil the public from above with manned aircraft or drones.

A 17-year-old Virginia teen faces up to 15 years in prison for blog and Twitter posts about encryption and Bitcoin that were geared at assisting ISIL, which the US has designated as a terror organization.

The teen, Ali Shukri Amin, who contributed to the Coin Brief news site, pleaded guilty (PDF) Thursday to a federal charge of providing material support to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Dana Boente, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the youth’s guilty plea “demonstrates that those who use social media as a tool to provide support and resources to ISIL will be identified and prosecuted with no less vigilance than those who travel to take up arms with ISIL.”