A Win for Yahoo! and for Privacy in Belgium

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Steakpinball

Yahoo! welcomes the decision last week by the Court of Appeal in Belgium, which highlights the importance of local law enforcement authorities following established international protocols when conducting their investigations.

In March 2009, a Belgian Criminal Court entered judgment in a criminal case against Yahoo! Inc. for the failure to disclose user data to Belgian law enforcement authorities. Yahoo! does not have a local subsidiary or a website in Belgium.  More importantly, the Belgian authorities did not follow the recognised legal process when it sought to obtain the user data from Yahoo! Inc., located in the U.S..  An official diplomatic channel exists between the U.S. and Belgium to facilitate appropriate information exchange (set up under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty), but this route was not taken by the Belgian authorities despite our encouragement to do so.

On 30 June 2010, the Belgian Court of Appeal overturned the March 2009 judgment. The Court of Appeal found there was insufficient jurisdiction to bring Yahoo! Inc.’s actions under Belgian telecommunications laws, and Yahoo! Inc. was acquitted of all charges and fines against it.

This judgment is a win for both the privacy of our users and also for common sense in international law enforcement:  the global nature of the internet does not subject companies offering services online – and their customers’ data – to the jurisdiction of every country globally.  We hope this judgment can send a signal to law enforcement authorities to use established legal process in their investigations; following such procedures is the best way to ensure that information gathering for law enforcement is conducted effectively and efficiently, whilst safeguarding data privacy and freedom of expression over the Internet.

by Jen Swallow | Legal Director, Product Compliance EMEA; and Albert Yung | Legal Intern | Yahoo! UK

Privacy in Peril: Lawyers, Nations Clamor for Google Wi-Fi Data

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sébastien Bertrand

By David Kravets | Wired Magazine | June 11, 2010

A hard drive with perhaps several hundred gigabytes of internet surfers’ private data resides under lock and key in a Portland, Oregon, federal courthouse.

Regulators and private lawyers across Europe and the United States are demanding, and in some cases obtaining, access to data that Google sniffed for the past three years from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots across the globe.

The requests are coming in some of the eight proposed class actions targeting Google that have cropped up across the United States, as well as from various governments investigating whether Google violated their laws.

The demands for data raise a paradox of sorts: How many eyeballs, in the name of privacy, will eventually see the data that likely includes snippets of e-mail, web surfing, documents and other private data?

“It will be relevant evidence in our lawsuit. We will ask for production of that data. Lawyers representing plaintiffs in the case will review the data,” said Patrick Keyes, a top lawyer in one of the proposed class actions lodged in the District of Columbia. “This would be in the context of presenting the legal interests of those who have had their data intercepted, and would typically be produced under a protective order.”

Google has already said it would forward to German, French and Spanish authorities the portion of the data intercepted in those countries.

No government agency in the United States has yet demanded a copy of the intercepted data, but several are investigating Google.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said he wanted to “scrutinize this situation” while Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has demanded “detailed records on any information taken from networks” from his state.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz told Congress, “We’re going to take a very, very close look at this.”

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said Friday that Google’s actions “warrants a hearing, at minimum.”

Ironically, it appears that protecting privacy and administering justice might just involve violating privacy.

“That’s true. All of this raises a lot of First Amendment questions,” said Jeffrey Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “It is problematic. Some of these lawyers see a quick buck without thinking of the consequences.”

U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman in Oregon has locked away the data (.pdf) as that class action proceeds. ISec Partners, a San Francisco security consulting firm, has made encrypted copies of the drives at Google’s request and destroyed the originals.

“The encryption keys for these drives are possessed by only myself and one other person. and the hard drives are securely stored in a safe controlled by Google’s physical security team,” (.pdf) Alexander Stamos, one of iSec’s founding partners, told the Oregon judge in a court filing before the data was forwarded to the Portland courthouse.

But Aaron Zigler, a lawyer in the Illinois class action, said, “I don’t want to see the actual data that has been intercepted.”

Class members of the lawsuits can be determined without actually reading the contents of the payload data packets, he said. “There is enough data to figure out who everyone is: date, time and location, and unique MAC addresses of the Wi-Fi network they intercepted,” he said.

Pablo Chavez, director of public policy for Google, said in a letter to Congress released Friday that Google is “aware of only two instances when any Google engineer even viewed the payload data.”

“The first instance involved the individual engineer who designed the software,”  (.pdf) he wrote. “The second instance was when we became aware that payload data may have been collected from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, and a single security engineer tested the data to verify that this was the case.”

Google has repeatedly said it is working with the relevant government investigators, and is demanding that all the litigation be consolidated in California, where it’s headquartered.

The Mountain View internet giant maintains the collection of data while taking photos for its Street View program was inadvertent –- the result of a programming error with code written for an early experimental project that wound up in the Street View code (.pdf), an explanation some of the lawyers suing Google have disputed.

Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in dozens of countries for the last three years, until German privacy authorities questioned what data Google’s Street View cameras were collecting. Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides panoramic pictures of streets and their surroundings across the globe.

And Google said no U.S. wiretapping laws were breached because the Wi-Fi signals were “readily accessible to the general public” (.pdf).

At least insofar as the proposed class actions were concerned, Jennifer Granick, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested having a judge or a so-called “special master” sift through the data to determine whose data Google obtained. That should only happen if Google is found to have done something unlawful, she said.

“This raises my eyebrows,” she said. “I don’t think we need to know what any of this data is yet, because there’s nothing to suggest Google did this intentionally.”

Google Calls for U.S., Europe to Crack Down on China Web Censorship

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Tim Yang

By Clint Boulton | eWeek.com | June 10, 2010

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge China to cease its censorship of the Internet because it restricts free trade. The Internet sector is vital to Google’s hopes for international expansion. China boasts more than 400 million Web users and Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Censorship in the form of the Great Firewall of China has been a long-standing complaint about China from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies looking to extend their tendrils in Asia.

Google wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge China to cease its censorship of the Internet, the search engine’s lead lawyer told the Associated Press in Brussels.

David Drummond, chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development at Google, June 9 said that China’s censorship restricts free trade for the Web, where Google is hungry to expand in China.

Western governments should defend the free trade for the Internet with the same kind of rules that they use to complain of China’s sale of products below cost, Drummond added.

Censorship in the form of the Great Firewall of China has been a long-standing complaint about China from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies looking to extend their tendrils in Asia while enjoying the same fair trade rules they enjoy in the U.S.

The sticky issue reared its head again in January when Google said it discovered a cyber attack originating from China in which users Gmail accounts were accessed.

Threatening to cease doing business in China entirely, Google in March shuttled its Chinese search operations to the region of Hong Kong, which doesn’t follow the same censorship restrictions as mainland China.

Shortly after this move, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told The Guardian he hoped the U.S. would make China’s Web censorship a “high priority.”

While the U.S. publicly supported Google’s position, little has happened on this front.

In country, U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration are dealing with issues such as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, in which thousands of barrels of crude oil are blotting the Gulf of Mexico each day.

Drummond called the hack attack the “final straw” and reinforced the company’s stance that China’s censorship restricts free trade.

“Censorship, in addition to being a human rights problem, is a trade barrier,” said Drummond, according to the AP. “If you look at what China does — the censorship, of course, is for political purposes but it is also used as a way of keeping multinational companies disadvantaged in the market.”

“It should be obvious that the Internet sector is very important to the west and so we should be working on seeing that that kind of trade is protected.”

Holding sway in China is crucial to Google’s hopes for international expansion. China boasts more than 400 million Web users and Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Being marginalized at Google.hk won’t do anything to help Google challenge the incumbent there.

The U.S. could make a case versus China with the World Trade Organization, though Drummond wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that.

He did say he received some support in the U.S., French and German governments and with the European Union executive for pressing Google’s case against Chinese Web censorship.

Muzzling the messengers

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Simone Ramella

The Economist | October 1, 2009 | Rome

On October 3rd a demonstration will be held in Rome to defend media freedom—not in a remote dictatorship, but in Italy itself. Journalists who have called the protest have good reason to worry. In Freedom House’s 2009 survey of media independence, Italy was downgraded to “partly free” and placed 73rd in a list of 195 countries (only just above Bulgaria). In this respect, at least, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy is distancing itself from western Europe and becoming more like weaker democracies farther east.

The Rome demonstration was called to protest over writs issued by the prime minister against two left-leaning newspapers. Mr Berlusconi is demanding damages of €1m ($1.5m) from La Repubblica for insisting on answers to ten questions about his private life. And he wants €2m from L’Unita (plus €200,000 apiece from five named journalists) for its articles, including one saying he abused his control of the media. L’Unita might close if it loses.

Mr Berlusconi’s writs seem to be part of a drive to flush out the few remaining rebel enclaves in the Italian media. His reply to talk of a conflict between his media interests and his political role has long been that he is still subject to plenty of criticism. Yes, he controls three of Italy’s seven main terrestrial television channels; another three, operated by the state-owned RAI, answer to a parliament dominated by his supporters; and he or his family own a leading daily, Il Giornale, plus a weekly news magazine and the country’s biggest publishing house. But of Italy’s main dailies, La Repubblica is firmly hostile, whereas Corriere della Sera and La Stampa are intermittently critical. The third RAI channel is run by the centre-left, and RAI’s radio network often provided unfavourable coverage. Even the evening news bulletin of Mr Berlusconi’s flagship channel, Canale 5, has run stories that embarrass him.

Since Mr Berlusconi returned to power last year, however, much has changed. Enrico Mentana, the news anchor long seen as a guarantor of Canale 5’s independence, walked out in April 2008, saying that he no longer felt “at home in a group that seems like an electoral [campaign] committee”. Journalists close to Mr Berlusconi have been appointed to edit RAI’s radio news and the bulletins of its first channel. And RAI has withdrawn legal support from its only real investigative programme.

Notwithstanding such efforts to appease the government, Mr Berlusconi’s allies have just launched an unprecedented assault on RAI, after one of its current-affairs programmes gave airtime to a woman who claims to have been paid to spend the night with the prime minister. Up to now, RAI has been seen as answerable only to a parliamentary committee. But on September 26th the government demanded that its most senior executives attend a meeting to “verify the impartiality” of the programme. A day later, Il Giornale and another newspaper close to the prime minister appealed to readers to stop paying the licence fees on which RAI depends for almost half its income.

Not since Mussolini’s time has an Italian government’s interference with the media been more blatant or alarming. Journalists, and other Italians, have every reason to protest.