2012
1/31/12
This is the second part of a two-part series on Anonymous, the amorphous Internet group that has emerged as a force in global affairs. In the first part, we track Anonymous' transition from pranks to politics. In this installment, we learn about its war on the government. You can read part one of the series here.
If Anonymous spans the moral range between the idealistic revolutionary and the nihilistic imp, Phoenix stands all the way at the idealistic end. His base of operations is a network of chat rooms called AnonOps, which birthed many of the overtly political attacks that have made Anonymous a front-page story during the last two years.
In the early days, anons were mostly self-proclaimed jerks who joked around on the website 4chan and played mean-spirited pranks on people for the hell of it. But in 2008, a prank on Scientology turned into a semi-serious protest movement, and some anons found themselves taking on the traditional roles of activists -- organizing demonstrations, gathering information, printing up fliers. By 2010, when Phoenix saw a news program about how anons had tracked down and harassed some woman who'd tossed a kitten into a Dumpster without noticing the overhead surveillance camera, Anonymous had begun to attract people who saw themselves as the good guys. Like many other anons who showed up around then, Phoenix came armed with an arsenal of political opinions. He said he'd been fascinated by politics since he was a kid, having grown up in a country deeply colored by its history of rebellion against the British Empire.
All of my conversations with Phoenix took place online, mostly in the AnonOps chat rooms, and we'd speak late at night, usually after he got home from hanging out with his college friends. He said these friends knew nothing of his shadow life in Anonymous, while his friends in Anonymous knew hardly anything about his life outside of it. Anonymous was a kind of utopia, he said, "a complete meritocracy" in which it was "impossible to discriminate against people based on superficial qualities because they don't exist when all you can see are their words."
He was a real romantic, and when he talked about the movement you could almost hear echoes of the anti-imperialist oratory of his ancestors. "The fact is that the internet is central to a lot of people's way of life," he said, "and for many Anons, a government attempt to restrict it is literally like an invasion of their territory."
Indeed, as he and many others saw it, Anonymous was fighting a "full scale information war" against the government-corporate complex over the future of the Internet. For years, the online world had been their "Wild West," to use one of Phoenix's analogies. The authorities had little power over it, and every dude and lady could write his or her own story: a nerd could reinvent himself as a bully, a chat-room cowboy with unusual sexual proclivities or a sick sense of humor could express himself without fear of social rejection.
Then the lawmakers came along with their anti-piracy bills -- their SOPAs, their PIPAs -- talking about the need to protect the big entertainment companies from copyright infringement. To the ears of Phoenix and many other anons, this sounded like, "We're going to conquer the Internet and subjugate its people." Today, the thinking went, the government might be chasing pirates; tomorrow, it might use its expanded powers to silence anyone it didn't like. So Anonymous rose up, and for several months, starting in late 2010, AnonOps had led the insurrection.
Phoenix, a talented writer with the aesthetic sensibility of some sort of Internet-rebel troubadour, contributed to the propaganda effort. For those who haven't seen the iconic Anonymous "Message" videos, they tend to feature made-for-Hollywood montages of disturbing imagery -- cops flailing their clubs, cars consumed by fire -- accompanied by a robot voice declaring cyber-war on governments and various other adversaries, typically concluding with some version of the following: "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."
In a video Phoenix sent me, a sort of AnonOps founding document, the writers had modified the tagline to crystallize the network's mission: "We do not forgive Internet censorship, and we do not forget free speech."
PROVING GROUNDS
This current fight over Internet censorship dates at least to 2008, when U.S. officials, members of the European Union and a handful of other nations began private negotiations over an international treaty aimed at curbing the spread of piracy. File-sharing had exploded in the previous decade, and the entertainment lobby had long been pressuring the U.S. government to do something about it.
According a report by the Record Industry Association of America in 2009, music sales in the U.S. had dropped by almost 50 percent in the decade since the emergence of the file-sharing website Napster. As of this year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, piracy costs the U.S. economy more than 300,000 jobs annually, though that seems a little high.
The idea behind the treaty, known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA, was that if the world’s governments could standardize their laws, they’d gain an advantage over the pirates. But the atmosphere of secrecy that surrounded the international talks led many in the tech world, including major players like Google, to charge that the government was more interested in ratcheting up its control of the Internet. (This criticism was more or less echoed during the recent outcry over similar legislation in the U.S. Congress.) Nevertheless, the United States and six other countries have signed the treaty and several others are considering joining them.
When an entertainment company suspects a person or website of engaging in piracy, they threaten legal action and demand that the offenders take down the stolen property. Rather then send out these "takedown" notices themselves, they often pass the job on to contractors, some of whom call themselves "web sheriffs," a label that fits in nicely with Phoenix's wild-west metaphor, though the more appropriate comparison might be to the Pinkertons.
In 2010, one such contractor, an employee of an Indian company called AiPlex, admitted in an interview that the firm had carried out Anonymous-style Distributed Denial of Service attacks against websites suspected of posting links to pirated material. This admission prompted a rumor that Hollywood companies had essentially ordered the attacks, and although both the MPAA and RIAA denied having done so, the damage had been done. "A wave of rage swept through the Anon community," Phoenix told me, and "a call to arms was quickly established."
Anons brought down the websites of AiPlex, the MPAA and the RIAA. Around the same time, they also hacked into several email servers, establishing the three-pronged modus operandi of the escalating war: (1) shut down websites, (2) expose emails (preferably embarrassing ones), (3) LOL. As in the early days of 4chan, the Internet nerd was using the tactics of the jerk against the self-important blowhard, except this time the blowhard was the corporate-state apparatus.
Of course, not everyone thought of Anonymous as the good guys, and as the anti-censorship anons waged war, they found themselves struggling to fend off attacks from unknown enemies who kept bringing down the servers that housed their networks. Some anons suspected those web sheriffs and other Internet mercenaries hired by the corporate opposition. (The MPAA and the RIAA both say they had nothing to do with these attacks, either, and stress that if anyone is a threat to free speech, it’s people who do carry out illegal attacks on websites, like anons.)
And then came Nov. 28, 2010, the day a hacker-turned-activist named Julian Assange and a shaky alliance of major media companies opened a new front in the information war by publishing a stash of U.S. diplomatic cables leaked to Assange and his website, WikiLeaks. This episode, and a specific sequence of events linked to it, led to what many in Anonymous hailed as the movement’s most glorious moment.
The day before those WikiLeaks documents went public, the U.S. State Department wrote a letter to Assange warning that if he allowed their publication he'd be breaking the law and endangering the lives of "countless innocent individuals -- from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security." About a week later, a cohort of financial-services companies announced they would block donations to WikiLeaks, cutting off a vital source of funding. To anons, the whole thing smelled of government meddling. A top executive at PayPal seemed to confirm this when he attributed the company’s decision to the influence of the State Department letter.
Another call went out to 4chan, the Anonymous mothership, summoning people to AnonOps for an "epic raid." But when Phoenix left for class that morning, he told me, the chat room for the operation only had about 150 people in it, so when he got home that night he didn't bother going online.
Instead he made some toast and marmalade and turned on the news. The top story: a certain shadowy collective of Internet hackers takes down MasterCard and Visa. "I distinctly remember knocking over my glass of water when I heard that," he said. He raced to his computer and was amazed to find that more than 6,000 people had answered the call.
Meanwhile, in a house in the Boston suburbs with about five times as many computers as people, Gregg Housh -- former Internet pirate, current unofficial Anonymous media guy -- answered his ringing phone. CNN wanted to know what was going on. Ditto The New York Times. Ditto a couple Indian newspapers. Ditto a seemingly endless parade of other outlets.
Anonymous had entered a new phase. It had shown the world that if "you screw with the Internet, the Internet screws with you," Phoenix said. And it had shown itself that the world was paying attention.
REVOLUTIONS AND SPIES
That winter, several governments made a speciality of screwing with the Internet. One was Tunisia, where the ruling regime had been especially damaged by the WikiLeaks cables. In one particularly vivid dispatch, a diplomat with an eye for irony noted that while ordinary Tunisians struggled to feed their families, the president’s family ate ice cream flown in by private plane from Saint-Tropez.
The Tunisian government responded by blocking WikiLeaks, a move that fell considerably short of quelling the anger of an impoverished citizenry already on the verge of revolt. Three weeks later, a 26-year-old fruit vendor set himself on fire in the town center of Sidi Bouzid. By the time the outrage spilled into the streets, some tech-savvy Tunisians had found their way to AnonOps.
One woman who described herself as an "observer" of AnonOps wrote to me with an account of what happened next. At first, she wrote, anons concentrated on trying to draw attention to the protests through their connections to the mainstream U.S. media, an endeavor that met with little success. Then the Tunisian government shut down the Internet. "And the people on the Internet sort of waged a shitstorm," she said.
Some anons who had never heard of Tunisia began referring to the country's citizens as their brothers. They put together "care packages" in .zip files: software that allowed protesters to circumvent Internet blocks; guides on how to treat broken arms and lost eyes; links that brought protesters into the network, where they could ask for help or post videos of the state police beating and shooting protesters.
The observer said the videos deeply disturbed her. "You see a five-year-old old get shot in the head and his neighbor was the one who was recording it," she said. "And his neighbor, a man who watched that kid grow, is the one pleading with you to please help." Watching that kind of violence left her ashamed of humanity, she said, and she'd considered herself hardened to some pretty disgusting things. After all, she said, "I go to 4chan."
The excitement of the Arab Spring held the attention of AnonOps through the winter, but the focus widened in February when someone told a reporter that he had infiltrated Anonymous and identified its "leaders."
Aaron Barr was the head of HBGary Federal, a new company that specialized in what he called social-media intelligence analysis -- gathering information about people from Facebook and Twitter. A former Navy cryptographer, he had developed a theory that he hoped to exploit in the private sector. He believed that "threat groups" like the Russian Business Network and al Qaeda attempted to spy on members of the U.S. intelligence community using social media (yes, the CIA is on Facebook), and that the intelligence community could in turn use such tools to penetrate the threat groups. He intended to sell his services as a consultant to the highest bidder.
To make his way into Anonymous, Barr created a social-media avatar named Julian Goodspeak. Enamored of a certain indestructible secret agent with well-defined feelings on martini preparation, Barr says he chose "Goodspeak" because it sounded like a name from a spy novel. "Julian" was a nod to Mr. Assange.
Barr insists he spied on Anonymous merely to prove his point about the ease of gathering intelligence about people through social media and never meant to share his information with the authorities. Anons didn't buy it. A small subgroup of hackers snuck into his company's servers and stole some 70,000 emails.
They say he got most of his information wrong. He says he accepts that "as a possibility." In any event, they went ahead and posted the entire trove online, along with his address, phone number and other personal information. "We had people driving by my house taking pictures," Barr told me. "A couple people coming up to my door with cameras in their hands. I was seriously, honestly concerned about my family's safety."
He left his job ("not in disgrace," he said) and moved his family to another location. Anonymous, meanwhile, pored over the emails and discovered what they believed was some of the most compelling evidence they'd ever seen of governments and corporations colluding to control the flow of online information. In November, their old pal Assange had said he planned to "take down" a major American bank, and two days later, the Bank of America lawyered up, retaining the services of Hunton & Williams, a Washington firm that apparently had some useful connections in the federal government. According to one of the emails exposed by Anonymous, the Justice Department had played matchmaker between the lawyers and the bank. The same email said that the Department had advised the bank to hire Barr's company. (The Justice Department declined to comment.)
In another email, anons found a PowerPoint presentation called "The WikiLeaks Threat." As it turned out, Barr's company and two others with similar profiles had pitched Hunton & Williams some ideas on how to handle Assange. In the most widely discussed of the slides, Barr vaguely suggested "disrupting" journalists who support Assange, singling out Glenn Greenwald of Salon. "Without the support of people like Glenn, Wikileaks would fold," he wrote.
In another pitch to the law firm, Barr said he'd dug up personal information on employees of left-wing organizations that oppose the Chamber of Commerce, naming a synagogue attended by one of them and identifying some family members of another. He says he did this merely to demonstrate his skill and never imagined the information would go public. But when the organizations found out about it they made a lot of noise, and a group of Democrats in Congress, led by Hank Johnson of Georgia, sent a letter to the Republican heads of four committees asking them to look into "possible illegal actions against citizens engaged in free speech."
The Republicans turned them down. Claude Chafin, a spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee, told me that the matter fell outside the group's jurisdiction; representatives of the other committees have yet to provide an explanation. Barr, for his part, explains their decisions by stressing that he broke no law and never saw a cent of the government's money. When I called Johnson, he said, "It appears that the reason why we're not having any investigations is that that would perhaps anger the people with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and it probably is just something that nobody wants to touch."
This fall, I spoke with Barrett Brown, a journalist who followed Anonymous for years before leaping off the perch of reportorial objectivity and into the story. He believes that Barr's emails offer a revelatory glimpse into the murky world of private espionage, a $2 billion industry comprising more than 9,000 companies. After the hack, he set up a website where people could search the emails and report their findings. They didn't find anything illegal, per se, but they did learn of an Air Force plan to manufacture an entire army of Julian Goodspeaks.
I spoke to Brown on video chat. He was serious and unsmiling and sounded like a philosophy professor, dropping references to Plato and ninth-century Baghdad. He said he was outraged that the Justice Department appeared to have acted as Bank of America's in-house counsel. "The fact that that happened and won't get a lot outcry shows that the republic is already over," he said.
Not that he saw this as such a bad thing, necessarily. A couple years ago, in a blog on The Huffington Post, Brown argued that the rapid spread of the Internet was effectively erasing national boundaries and would soon usher in the dawn of a new era, one in which the people of the world would transfer their allegiances from traditional nation-states to online communities that actually protected their interests. He cited the emergence of Anonymous as a sign of the changing times. "Some people call it the rise of the nerds," he said.
For what it was worth, he preferred the term "online actors," which turned out to be a rare area of agreement between him and the authorities. Last spring, in a report on the mounting security challenges of the information age, NATO had named Anonymous as an important new actor on "the international stage." More specifically, it warned that Anonymous might soon develop the capability of breaking into government networks and stealing sensitive documents.
Anonymous responded by breaking into NATO's network and stealing sensitive documents.
SPLINTERING AND NEW TARGETS
The Barr affair had reinfused Anonymous with some of its old lifeblood: the lulz. The way anons saw it, Barr had "poked the bear," and the bear was only too happy to have an opportunity for some good old-fashioned mauling. After stealing his emails and shutting down his website, the hackers wiped his iPad and iPhone, circulated a picture of him dressed up as the Hulk for an evening of trick-or-treating with one of his kids, and somehow broke into his Twitter account, where they looked up Justin Bieber and Hitler and clicked "follow." As they say on the Internet, "Ha ha."
For as long as the spotlight had been on AnonOps, the media had largely portrayed Anonymous as well-meaning "hacktivists," but some observers now began to pick up on the notes of malevolent snickering mixed in with the trumpet blasts of idealistic rhetoric. Some of the hackers who had carried out the attack splintered off into their own crew, LulzSec, and in addition to setting their sights on police departments and other familiar foes of the anarchist, they went after seemingly inoffensive companies like Nintendo, and even exposed the names of subscribers to a pornography website. Anons, on the whole, do not disapprove of pornography, but it seems that the "lol" factor, as one member of LulzSec put it to me, was too delicious to resist. "Exposing people's adult activities to the public, and even their families," he said. "What could be better?"
The formation of LulzSec coincided with a "civil war" in AnonOps, which broke out when some of the anons who moderated the channels demoted a moderator named Ryan Cleary, the owner of one of the network's key servers. A volatile teenager, Cleary disconnected the server, throwing the network into chaos. A few months later the London police arrested him for his involvement in attacks against some of the usual anti-piracy foes and Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency. When they showed up to the house where he lived with his mother, they found tinfoil covering his window. His mother told the press that he hadn't left his room for six months, except to go to the bathroom.
Over the summer, another fight erupted when a moderator upset several others by talking about his attraction to underage boys. They temporarily banned him from the chat room, and some anons left the network in disgust. They felt it had had betrayed its commitment to free speech.
The community was falling apart, destroying itself in a fight over control of the Internet, of all things. A series of arrests had put everyone on edge -- Phoenix said he barely slept for two weeks -- and then a blitz of DDoS attacks from unknown enemies shut down AnonOps for weeks. By the time the network resurfaced in September, months had gone by without a decent raid.
The network’s traffic plummeted. On a good night this winter, the most crowded chat room in AnonOps would draw perhaps only 200 people. In its heyday a little over a year ago, an ordinary night drew 30 times that number.
Several people complained to me that AnonOps had seen its best days, but when I repeated this to Phoenix, he said he wasn't worried. Anonymous, he said, is like a pool of sulphur boiling under the hills of Wyoming. "It lies dormant for weeks," he said. "You know it's done big things in the past, but you can never tell exactly when it will suddenly rise up and unleash a wave of rage."
This was three weeks before the Department of Justice bust and the massive attack that followed.
2012
By Selena Frye
January 25, 2012
Takeaway: Symantec acknowledges a breach that exposed the source code for pcAnywhere. Users are advised to disable it immediately until software updates are available to resolve vulnerabilities.
In August 2011, CNET reported the claims by Anonymous that they had breached servers of Symantec (among others) and now, Symantec has acknowledged that their own investigation reveals that the source code for pcAnywhere was stolen…in 2006! Symantec issued a technical white paper with security recommendations and a message on their website about the serious breach — surely an embarrassing situation for the maker of Internet security-related products, including the Norton suite of antivirus software. pcAnywhere is a software program from Symantec that many enterprises use to manage corporate PCs.
Here is an excerpt from the white paper (PDF):
Upon investigation of the claims made by Anonymous regarding source code disclosure, Symantec believes that the disclosure was the result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006. We believe that source code for the 2006-era versions of the following products was exposed: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere.
Security recommendations include:
•Symantec recommends disabling pcAnywhere until they release software updates that resolve “currently known vulnerability risks.”
•As far as the other source code exposure related to the 2006 versions of the Norton products as detailed in their statement above, Symantec says that the “code in question represents a small percentage of the pre-release source for the Symantec AntiVirus 10.2 product, accounting for less than 5% of the product.” They recommend only that customers update their AV definitions and follow general best practices.
Here is the page on Symantec’s site that they will update with further information if anything changes: Claims by Anonymous about Symantec Source Code.
Here is a further summary of the risks posed by pcAnywhere users, according to the Symantec white paper:
Malicious users with access to the source code have an increased ability to identify vulnerabilities and build new exploits. Additionally, customers that are not following general security best practices are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks which can reveal authentication and session information. General security best practices include endpoint, network, remote access, and physical security, as well as configuring pcAnywhere in a way that minimizes potential risks.
So there you have it. How would you characterize this disclosure? How is it that we seem to be talking about a theft that occurred five or six years ago? The sequence of events is kind of weird. According to a report in The Register:
A hacker calling himself “Yama Tough”, acting as a spokesperson for the group, claims the source code had been pulled from insecure Indian government servers, implying that Symantec was required to supply their source code to Indian authorities. In a series of Twitter updates, Yama Tough talked about various plans to release the source code before committing to release the secret sauce of pcAnywhere.
The Yama Tough tweeting occurred on Monday.
2012
By Bob Eisenhardt
January 23, 2012
Takeaway: Bob Eisenhardt explains how the Facebook virus Ramnit works, why it’s so bad, and how it can affect much more than a Facebook account.
Ramnit is advertised as a lethal virus for attacking Facebook, having stolen 45,000 accounts and passwords. The virus itself is actually pulled from a used parts bin of older virus infestations such as the Zeus botnet. But it can now be controlled remotely for all kinds of mayhem too. According to Amit Klein, CTO of a web security services firm, last year it was just a nasty botnet. This new version has added power by being retrofitted with financial fraud capabilities. It can capture any data in any web session. Now, this writer has been a passionate HATER of cloud based computing, so in my view, having your data or (worse) sensitive client data stored through the Internet and accessed by HTML files, provides an open door for Ramnit, a truly awful threat to anything and everything web-based.
This monster begins by attaching itself to (as they always do) Windows files such as EXE, SCR and good old DLL files (when can we rid ourselves of those?) as well as Word documents. HTML files are also in this group, and it can now discover our handy pocket friend: USB cards. Once it has this new home, an autorun script ensures infection of whatever else our key is plugged into. Now resident in a system, it buries itself into the registry (nothing new there) and uses a hidden browser instance to connect to your friendly Hacker, and run scripts to find financial stuff and send it over to an eager thief. As Dr. Leonard McCoy said in STAR TREK IV: “Oh, joy.”
Ramnit leaves behind some classic symptoms of a virus. One user posted a note that his laptop was now clean (I doubt it) but he had one file named “yghaubfg.exe” and a folder “qdpnkxvp” on his system under Downloads. I am always amazed that hackers employ such obvious and fraudulent names for the files, for which we may be thankful. The latter file and directory name seem standard for Ramnit.
Cleaning up after Ramnit
Technicians love to spend hours on diagnostics and discovering how things work. While interesting, I prefer sanity to extended effort, so I endorse using a BartPE boot CD to clean your system. Better yet, maintain a GHOST image of your primary operating system drive and also have a redundant system, a secondary computer, to act as your station in case your primary fails. (A note on my preferred system configuration: my stations have two hard drives: OPSYS and STORAGE. The operating system drive contains just that and nothing else. STORAGE stores literally “everything else” inclusive of a ghost image. I highly commend this protocol).
The removal process is otherwise complex. One expert ran Avast antivirus, and a 2 hour scan revealed 4,300 infected files. Believe me that while re-installation may be the only option at this point, I commend a ghost image as discussed just above as a FAR better solution for rebuilding. This expert was also worried about .DOC and .HTML files being infected, which is another good reason for an independent backup location. Rolling back the registry to a restore point did not work either, all points having been deleted. (But Windows search still had the doggie. Go figure). Trust me, spending 30 minutes for a ghost image restore is a bargain of time utilization and keeps the stress level low.
Remedies for Facebook
All of which means that Facebook is nothing more than a really great delivery system for Ramnit to find other places to burrow into, which makes Facebook so damn dangerous. The worst of it is that people use it in their workplace. If your organization is into cloud computing, you have a really nice LEGAL exposure issue and a potential lawsuit in your future.
As for defense issues, the standard concepts of changing passwords every 30 days on Facebook is a good first, but simple step. A better step in the workplace is to lock out Facebook entirely, if it has no business use. There is an easy way to do this.
OpenDNS is a terrific web-management protocol, and has the paid program (inexpensive) has the ability to manage white and black lists. Implementing the DNS servers is simple. Once you have their DNS servers IP addresses, dig into the router or server, and replace your ISP DNS systems with their systems and voila! OpenDNS is your best friend. Dig into the Black list and add Facebook and whatever else you want. Users may scream, which is a good time to have them read not only this article but also anything describing the consequences of a lawsuit and unemployment benefits.
Danny Harris, security guru at Aon group, held a security seminar in 2003 that left the whole IT staff shaking their heads in shame. The bad guys are so good at what they do that our puny efforts seemed doomed to eternal failure. Case in point: virus code buried inside photographs that are impossible to see or detect. Same with the famous Facebook “two blondes” picture. Rule of thumb: someone sends you a picture: dump with freedom. The best rule is trust NOBODY and enjoy only your own photographs. On Facebook, this is a tall order indeed. Open a picture = hello Ramnit.
The root problem is that so we are Internet-web based for absolutely everything in life. Bill-paying is now the online way to live along with financial account access. Major banks have gotten better to a degree. If I try to access my accounts from another computer other than the one I have at home, the security protocols require a send and verify code to email, which is a great idea … unless someone hijacks my email too (from Facebook) and can get the code and impersonate me (from Ramnit) which is not farfetched idea at all. It really makes me long for my old DOS 3.2 computer in some ways.
Having scared myself to pieces, I created a GHOST image of this computer. Took 10 minutes to create = same to restore if I have to. Trust me, this is a far better, less stressful method to repair a computer.
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2012
Published January 18, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO – Can the world live without Wikipedia for a day?
The online encyclopedia is one of the Internet's most visited sites, and at midnight Eastern Standard Time it began a 24-hour "blackout" in protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation that many leading websites -- including Reddit, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others -- contend will make it challenging if not impossible for them to operate.
It's a dramatic response to the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, a pair of bills backed by the motion picture and recording industries that are intended to eliminate theft online once and for all.
Simply put, S. 968 and H.R. 3261 would require ISPs to block access to foreign websites that infringe on copyrights. Online piracy from China and elsewhere is a massive problem for the media industry, one that costs as much as $250 billion per year and costs the industry 750,000 jobs, according to a 2008 statement by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). But how exactly the bills would counter piracy has many up in arms.
"There are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet," Google spokeswoman Samantha Smith told FoxNews.com on Tuesday. The site joined Wikipedia by presenting readers with a black bar over its logo, and other websites have prominent SOPA protest content posted. But the online encyclopedia's blackout is a line-in-the-sand action -- and it isn't sitting well with some of its volunteer editors.
"My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."
Wikipedia's English-language site shut down at midnight Eastern Standard Time Tuesday and the organization said it would stay down for 24 hours.
Instead of encyclopedia articles, visitors to the site saw a stark black-and-white page with the message: "Imagine a world without free knowledge." It carried a link to information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers.
The shutdown adds to a very vocal body of critics who are speaking out against the legislation. But the bill's many supporters -- including the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and News Corp., the parent company of FoxNews.com -- argue that those critics simply misunderstand the bill.
“Anti-piracy legislation now before Congress finally addresses the threat of foreign piracy, and it’s unfortunate that so many opponents have resorted to inaccurate and flatly dishonest claims in an attempt to derail it," said Timothy Lee, vice president of legal and public affairs for the Center for Individual Freedom.
Chris Dodd, chairman of the MPAA, denounced the blackout as a stunt, News.com reported. "[It's] an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services."
Indeed, some of Wikipedia's editors are so uneasy with the move that they have blacked out their own user profile pages or resigned their administrative rights on the site to protest. Some likened the site's decision to fighting censorship with censorship.
One of the site's own "five pillars" of conduct says that Wikipedia "is written from a neutral point of view." The site strives to "avoid advocacy, and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them."
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that the site can maintain neutrality in content even as it takes public positions on issues.
"The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened," he tweeted.
Social news website Reddit.com is shutting down for 12 hours on Wednesday as well, but most companies are staying up. Dick Costollo, CEO of Twitter, said he opposes the legislation as well, but shutting down the service was out of the question.
"Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish," Costollo tweeted.
The plans for the protest were moving forward even though the bill's prospects appeared to be dimming. On Saturday, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the bill would not move to the House floor for a vote unless consensus is reached. However, Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said work on the bill would resume next month.
The White House raised concerns over the weekend, pledging to work with Congress to battle piracy and counterfeiting while defending free expression, privacy and innovation in the Internet. The administration signaled it might use its veto power, if necessary.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
2012
January 16, 2012
Popular online shoe retailer Zappos.com said late Sunday that hackers had accessed its network, stealing customer account information from as many as 24 million customers.
Credit card information was not stolen, company CEO Tony Hsieh said in a statement sent to users, but email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits from credit cards -- and more -- may have been compromised.
"We were recently the victim of a cyberattack by a criminal who gained access to parts of our internal network and systems through one of our servers in Kentucky," reads a statement posted on the company's blog. "We are cooperating with law enforcement to undergo an exhaustive investigation."
The company stressed that credit cards were not affected, and that it has already reset the passwords for existing customers to prevent abuse of the stolen data.
A special page on the Zappos website has been created to facilitate password changes for users: www.zappos.com/passwordchange.
The company is well regarded for its customer service; Hsieh expressed concerns that the security breach might affect the time spent burnishing the company's image.
"We've spent over 12 years building our reputation, brand, and trust with our customers. It's painful to see us take so many steps back due to a single incident," he wrote.
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