2010 the year the internet went to war threat level wired

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2010: The Year the Internet Went to War

By David Kravets December 27, 2010 | 7:00 am | Categories:Copyrights and Patents, Cybersecurity,WikiLeaks

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gives a statement on the WikiLeaks document release on

November 29, 2010, at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Photo: AP

It was a year without parallel. Threat Levels bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security,

privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes.

Google defeated Chinas censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest

computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nations longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder

who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally

put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.

A myriad of court decisions seemed to be a boon for online rights, while others clearly were a step

backward. The year 2010 saw the rise of the newspaper copyright troll, and judges pushed back on absurd

jury verdicts for music file sharing and outdated electronic spying rules.

And a secret-spilling website flirting with insolvency and dissolution suddenly burst onto the world stage.

WikiLeaks was without a doubt the biggest 2010 development in Threat Levels world.

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WikiLeaks Takes On World Powers

As the year began, the project appeared to be on its last legs just another cypherpunk fever dream

destined for the same dustbin as digital cash and assassination politics. Site founderJulian Assange had

abandoned the wiki portion of the concept, after crowds of volunteer analysts failed to congeal around

WikiLeaks impressive, but not yet explosive, trove.

Bradley Manning as he appeared in his Facebook photo.

Assange also experimented with auctioning early access to leaks for news outlets, without immediate success.By January, the site had hit financial bankruptcy, and its homepage and archive were replaced by a public

plea for donations.

Then came Bradley Manning, a disaffected 22-year-old Army intelligence officer who wanted people to see

the truth. With one disturbing video and nearly a million leaked U.S. documents later, WikiLeaks had raised

more than $1.2 million, and ignited a battle over the meaning ofjournalism, national security and censorship.

The WikiLeaks saga began in earnest with the April release of the Collateral Murder video showing more

than a dozen people in Iraq being killed in three U.S. Apache helicopter attacks.

Victims included two Reuters employees, one carrying a camera that was apparently mistaken for a weapon.

The partial release of 92,000 reports from the war in Afghanistan followed in July. Then came 400,000 Iraq

war reports in October, and finally the slow, steady disclosure of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that kicked

off just after Thanksgiving.




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The "Collateral Murder" scene shortly after the 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Iraq was exposed byWikiLeaks.

Along the way, Manning was arrested and locked away in a Marine brig. A war broke out within WikiLeaks

ranks. And Assange became the subject of a U.S. grand jury investigation that may have broad ramifications

for the First Amendment.

The State Department said Assanges publication of U.S. diplomatic cables was illegal. But Assange bills

WikiLeaks as a media organization, and no media outlet has ever been prosecuted for publishing classified

information in the United States.

WikiLeaks and the Future

Yet more is at stake than Assanges freedom and the future of WikiLeaks. The site has shown us that the

right to maintain a presence on the internet regularly runs counter to the nets gatekeepers that often are

motivated by profit.

As the New Year approached, WikiLeaks was caught scrambling to maintain its online presence and financial

pipeline. Amazon cut off its web hosting, and PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Bank of America blocked

donations to the organization. Apple even banned an iPhone app designed to facilitate access to Wikileakscache of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables.

A lot of really important stuff happened this year that forces us to begin to think about that there are so many

people who depend on private companies to enjoy the fruits of technology, said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic




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Frontier Foundations legal director. If the private company stands up for us we have rights, and if it doesnt,

we dont.

Springing to WikiLeaks defense were the pranksters and activists known as Anonymous, who overwhelmed

the websites of WikiLeaks enemies real and perceived with junk internet traffic in coordinated attacks

dubbed Operation Payback. A more constructive protest grew from the grassroots, with supporters

volunteering their own websites to host mirrors of WikiLeaks Cablegate page, ensuring it can never be

removed from the web.

More than anything, the online protests exposed a generational struggle for the heart and soul of the net. Its a

high-stakes conflict between corporations that have grown fat and powerful off the web over nearly two

decades and the first generation to grow up with the modern internet as a daily element in their lives.

Both sides believe the internet belongs to them. If history is a guide, it would be unwise to bet against the kids

over the establishment.

Stuxnet: Code Creates Havoc

If WikiLeaks showed that the most powerful government on Earth can be brought to tears by stateless

freedom-of-information rebels, the Stuxnet virus proved the most despotic governments can be similarly

harmed by well-written code.

The virus hit Irans Natanz nuclear facility, prompting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to suggest in

November the malicious computer code was launched by enemies of the state. He said it had sabotaged

centrifuges used in Irans nuclear-enrichment program. Although not proven, those enemies could be Israel.

Stuxnet. It is in my book the most important development of the year. It is when things started changing,said F-Secures Chief Research OfficerMikko Hyppnen, in a telephone interview from Helsinki. It is the

first real example of cybersabotage being done with malware.




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Image: TheG/Flickr

Google at Home and Abroad

A different government is likely behind the other giant hacking news of 2010.

Google went public in January with the startling disclosure that its systems had been deeply penetrated by

sophisticated foreign attackers who had targeted e-mail accounts of human-rights activists. Since then, it has

emerged that at least 33 companies have been similarly targeted.

Google didnt explicitly blame the Chinese government, but it didnt have to: Googles response was to takethe unprecedented step ofhalting its government-mandated censorship of web searches in China through a

series of technological and legal dodges. Amazingly, China didnt boot Google out of the country, despite

repeated threats.

In the United States, Google was looking less heroic after it ceded ground in the crucial fight for net neutrality.

The company joined with Verizon in August to announce a congressional plan that abandons the idea of

network neutrality for wireless spectrum. The plan meant wireless carriers could discriminate against content

providers, big and small, by selling carriage rights or by refusing to carry at all.

Net Neutrality on Life Support

The proposal was in response to an April federal appeals court decision that said the Federal

Communications Commission had no power to enforce its principles of net neutrality, absent congressional




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authority. The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, came after Comcast

appealed an FCC reprimand for having sabotaged its customers BitTorrent traffic.

So, Google and Verizon suggested a compromise to get the ball rolling: Mandate net neutrality for wireline

internet, but not for wireless. Days before Christmas, the FCC adopted a plan similar to that proposal, a

move likely to reach the courts again.

Still, Google was responsible for winning perhaps one of the most important internet-freedom civil lawsuits,

Viacoms copyright action lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton dismissed the long-running litigation, ruling in June that internet

companies, even if they know they are hosting infringing material posted by third parties, are immune from

copyright liability if they promptly remove works at a rights holders request under what is known as a

takedown notice authorized by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Viacom has appealed, arguing the ruling will completely destroy copyright. When the entertainment industry

speaks of a legal development in such apocalyptic terms, its a good indicator that the development marks a

modest advance.

Cyberthieves and Copyright Shenanigans

Between Stuxnet and the Google attacks, one could almost forget that private, profit-oriented hackers can

still hold their own in terms of impact. Reminding us of that was Albert Soupnazi Gonzalez. The 29-year-old

Secret Service informant led a gang of cyberthieves who stole more than 90 million credit and debit card

numbers from TJX and other major retailers.




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Albert "Soupnazi" Gonzalez. Photo: courtesy of Stephen Watt

Gonzalez was sentenced in March to 20 years in prison a record for a U.S. hacking case. Hes now at the

low-security federal prison in Milan, Michigan, sporting the kind of Buck Rogers release date once reserved

for drug kingpins: October 11, 2025.

In other prosecutions, the government was less successful. The feds launched a first-of-its-kind jury trial of a

Southern California man on allegations of modding Xboxes to play pirated games a violation of the

DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions. Defendant Matthew Crippen faced five years for each of two

DMCA counts. The case collapsed in December from an excess ofprosecutorial bungling.

Copyright law has better served Americas first newspaper copyright troll, Righthaven. The Las Vegas

litigation factory has lodged more than 190 infringement suits against bloggers on behalf of print

conglomerates Stephens Media and MediaNews Group.

Many of the cases targeted websites that had posted modest excerpts of newspaper stories without

permission, and some involved content posted by users of a website, instead of the operators. Nonetheless,

dozens of the cases were settled out of court for undisclosed terms. By years end, Righthaven had shifted itslitigation strategy to go after sites that crib newspaper images.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in January reduced a record $1.92 million file sharing verdict to $54,000 after

concluding the award against infamous file sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset for infringing 24 songs was

shocking.

And Limewire, the popular file sharing service with some 50 million monthly users, shuttered in Octoberafter

a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America, and found the New York

company liable for a substantial amount of copyright infringement.

The U.S. government went on an unprecedented copyright-and-trademark offensive, closing down 82

websites across the globe linked to the sale or distribution of faked goods or file sharing. The November

domain name seizures represented a substantial escalation of law enforcement activity from Operation Our

Sites announced in June, when the Justice Department seized nine domains because they allegedly allowed

users to stream first-run movies over the internet.

Your Right to E-Mail Privacy

Most important, the year 2010 witnessed a major milestone in a long-simmering fight for e-mail privacy.

The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the Fourth Amendment, regardless of

what the 1986 Stored Communications Act said, protected Americans e-mail. It was one, all-too-rare case

of rebuking the clich that the law does not keep up with technology.




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Image: Subliminati/Flickr

The Stored Communications Act, a relic from an age where CompuServe was king, allows the government to

obtain a suspects e-mail from an internet service provider or webmail service without a probable-cause

warrant once the messages have been stored for at least 180 days. It was enacted at a time when e-mail

generally wasnt stored on servers for a long time, but instead held there briefly on their way to a recipients

inbox.

The Barack Obama administration fought against the ruling. The decision, if it withstands Supreme Court

scrutiny, means the authorities need a court warrant to access e-mail from mail providers.

The Fourth Amendment, the appeals court ruled in December, must keep pace with the inexorable march

of technological progress, or its guarantees will wither and perish.

Happy New Year.

Pages:123 View All

Tags: Albert Gonzalez, Censorship, courts, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fourth Amendment, google,

Julian Assange, Matthew Crippen, MediaNews Group, Righthaven, Stephens Media, Stored

Communications Act, Stuxnet, verizon, Xbox

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