Net Politics -Wired News

After a daylong standoff, authorities shot and killed an armed man wearing an explosive device who had taken three hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia.

Most of the hundreds of employees, including children at an on-site daycare center, had already been evacuated, police said. The station was airing its normal broadcast. The three hostages were safe and out of the building, the police said.

The 43-year-old suspect, James Lee, was killed by a police officer inside the building when he pointed a handgun at one of the hostages, said Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger. He said the explosive device “appeared to go off” when the gunman was shot inside the building. Police were combing the building in belief they might find other explosive devices, he said.

“He pulled out the handgun he came in with and pointed it at one of the hostages,” Manger said. “But at that point, our tactical unit moved in. They shot the suspect. The suspect is deceased.”

According to a message on the savetheplanetprotest.com website believed run by Lee, the suspect demanded that the Discovery Channel broadcast its “commitment to save the planet.”

Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

From his website, and his postings on MySpace, Lee appears to be obsessed with the work of American writer Daniel Quinn, author of a trilogy of environmental philosophy novels. Quinn’s 1992 Ishmael “uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution,” according to Wikipedia. “It posits that human supremacy is a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civilization is enacting that myth.”

Manger, the police chief, said officers were discussing his manifesto with the suspect during the standoff. “He obviously had a number of issues with Discovery,” Manger said.

In a December 2006 post to a MySpace group, Lee described being deeply affected by the trilogy. “I have an idea on how to save the world,” he wrote. “I need people.”

I finished reading the Daniel Quinn books last month. It started off just as a recommendation from a girl who worked at a coffeehouse. After being blown away from his writings, I looked up and saw… nothing. No revolution, no people demanding change, no talk, no news, nothing. There should have been something, right? Nothing.

Then I had an idea of my own. A vision on how the world could be saved. I thought about it and thought about it and it made sense. It was possible. It not unusual but not so common. It was an idea.

So here I am trying to make that idea a reality. Here I am putting my every last cent into that idea. I believe it can be done and I am taking the first few steps to make that idea a reality. So strongly do I believe it can be done that I am putting up all my own personal money, my retirement money.

He did not describe his idea, but Whois records show he registered savetheplanetprotest.com on January 7, 2008. He used the website to promote a sparsely attended February, 2008 rally outside the Discovery Channel headquarters, where he demanded the cable channel adapt its programming to broadcast Quinn’s vision for how to save the planet.

During the sixth day of the protest, Lee created a small riot by throwing money in the air in front of the building. The incident was captured in a YouTube video.

Lee was arrested on the scene after the money-throwing. He resurfaced on the internet two weeks later to express disappointment over how the protest had gone.

“Yeah, I guess the world did not get saved that week as I had hoped,” he wrote. “Was that a failure? Probably. Imagine the police holding me for 2 whole weeks!!! They threw me in the nuthouse for 4 days without bond and then continued to hold me for 2 weeks total until they could ‘verify’ my address and threw me in a homeless shelter. It was total bullshit.”

Lee’s preoccupation with the Quinn novels ran through his online writings, and was reflected in his demands to the Discovery Channel. “The Discovery Channel and its affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s ‘My Ishmael’ pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas,” read his website.

Daniel Quinn is a kind of anarcho-environmental Ayn Rand — an idea-driven author who’s Ishmael trilogy has inspired followers around the around the world. “Ishmael for them does what the movie The Matrix did for a lot of people,” says Ted Bolha, a Pittsburgh man who formed a local discussion group for Quinn readers. “Quinn writes a lot about indigenous people, tribal people. He basically calls the civilized people ‘takers’, and the uncivilized people ‘leavers’ — they just accept what nature offers, and don’t suck the resources dry.”

“I believe Avatar was influenced by Ishmael. The whole movie of Avatar just reeks of Ishmael,” he says.

But the trilogy does not advocate violence.

“It explains how the paradigm in which our culture exists came to be, and sort of points out errors in that paradigm,” says 55-year-old Mark Maffei, a former college teacher in Illinois who used to run a discussion group for his students called the Rock River Valley Leavers. “One of the errors in the paradigm is that man is the inheritor of the Earth, the owner of the Earth … That we get to decide what creatures live and what don’t.”

“It’s not a radical notion that should cause somebody to go take hostages,” Maffei adds. “The point of his books is actually different from that. Some deranged person did a crazy act that I don’t think has anything to do with the message in the books.”

Vincent Savage, an Aspen, Colorado psychologist and Quinn fan, agrees.

“Ishmael is about a state of mind, about building one’s awareness about our place in the universe,” Savage said. “This has nothing to do with Ishmael other than this person found a convenient metaphor for acting out his own personal frustrations.”

Updated 19:00 EDT

Photo: Myspace

A civilian defense attorney hired recently by alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning says the Army was so concerned about his client’s mental health prior to the alleged leaks that supervisors removed the bolt from his military weapon, disabling it.

Attorney David Coombs told CNN, however, that other than sending Manning to a chaplain for counseling, the Army did little to address its concerns about him.

“The unit has in fact documented a history, if you will, from as early as December of 2009 to May of 2010 of behavior that they were concerned about,” Coombs said, adding that Manning’s immediate supervisor “did document prolonged periods of disassociated behavior, quite a bit of nonresponsiveness from Pfc. Manning. And, again, that progressed from the very beginning of the deployment and deteriorated somewhat toward the end.”

The Army declined to comment. “This case does have worldwide visibility and [Manning’s] civilian attorney will do the best he can to defend him and that may bring up other issues other than what is currently known,” said Lt. Col. Robert Owen, spokesman for the Army at the U.S. embassy in Iraq. “But the U.S. Army is not going to react to every statement that Manning’s civilian attorney makes.”

Manning, who is being held in solitary confinement at the Navy brig at Quantico, Virginia, has invoked the Fifth Amendment and is refusing to cooperate with investigators. He’s taking medication for depression and insomnia. Coombs told CNN, however, that his client is aware of the public support for him.

“Obviously, being in solitary confinement is very difficult,” Coombs said. “But the individuals at the confinement facility are very professional. They’re doing a very good job. And he’s aware of all the people who are rallying to his support. So his spirits are relatively good. In addition, he is being treated now by a forensic psychiatrist. And he is responding positively to that treatment.”

Manning is due to be examined by a panel of three mental-health experts to determine what problems he’s suffering from now and may have been suffering from at the time of the alleged leaks.

Coombs also said that he has currently seen nothing that indicates “there’s any evidence” tying his client to the leaks. It was unclear in the interview, however, whether he’s yet received discovery material in the case.  Coombs did not respond to requests for comment from Threat Level.

Manning, 22, shows in chats he conducted with former hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in, that he was deeply troubled and conflicted. He was socially isolated and estranged from family members and described a number of personal issues that were affecting his emotional stability. He also described a growing cynicism about U.S. foreign policy that motivated his alleged leaks to WikiLeaks.

Shortly after the alleged leaks occurred, Manning was demoted after punching a fellow soldier in the face. Manning told Lamo that as a result of the incident he was “forced” to visit behavioral health personnel for an evaluation.

He’d also been admonished in the past for referencing classified facilities in personal videos he posted to YouTube.

Manning was arrested in May after telling Lamo that he was responsible for leaking a classified 2007 video showing an Army Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, which WikiLeaks published last April. Manning also claimed to have leaked an Army log of half a million military events in Iraq, a separate video of a military attack in Afghanistan in 2009, and 260,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables.

Manning was charged last month with leaking the Iraq video, and improperly downloading more than 150,000 State Department cables onto his unclassified personal computer. He’s charged with leaking more than 50 of them. The Pentagon has described Manning as a “person of interest” in the leaking of the 92,000-entry Afghan war log partially published by WikiLeaks in July.

WikiLeaks has never acknowledged that Manning is a source. Nonetheless the site, as well as a number of other organizations and websites, have been raising funds for Manning’s defense.

Manning isn’t the only one facing legal trouble, however.

Swedish authorities announced on Wednesday that they were re-opening a rape case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Public Prosecutions Director Marianne Ny said there was “reason to believe a crime has been committed” and that the crime was classified as rape.

She also announced she was re-classifying a second “molestation” case against Assange as one of sexual coercion and sexual molestation.

Assange, who was questioned by investigators on Tuesday, has maintained his innocence.

(Image: Anti-war protesters rally for Bradley Manning in Quantico, Virginia last month. Creative Commons photo courtesy mar is sea Y/Flickr)

See also:

• Alleged WikiLeaks Leaker Hires Civilian Attorney
• Mississippi Lawyer Drawn Into WikiLeaks Intrigue
• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
• WikiLeaks Suspect’s YouTube Videos Raised ‘Red Flag’ in 2008
• WikiLeaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs — Is Iraq Next?
• Suspected WikiLeaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

Notorious filesharing website The Pirate Bay is a long-standing enemy of the movie industry, but one Swedish filmmaker has plans to create a documentary called TPB AFK about the three founders of the site, and their reactions to being found guilty of being accessory to crime against copyright law and fined about $3.6 million.

The director, Simon Klose, who has a law degree, has 200 hours of footage saved up and plans to record more during the trio’s appeal against their verdict, which is set for less than a month from now, on 28 September, 2010. In three days, he raised nearly $30,000 on Kickstarter to pay for a professional editor and use of an editing suite in putting together what he described as a “complex story”.

The documentary’s name, Klose says, is a reference to how the site’s founders had to confront reality: “AFK is computer slang for being offline, so TPB AFK is the story about a group of people in a digital community who, at times, are forced to leave the internets and deal with life offline — away from keyboard.”

Klose asks: “How did Tiamo, a beer crazy hardware fanatic, Brokep, a tree hugging eco activist and Anakata — a paranoid hacker libertarian — get the White House to threaten the Swedish government with trade sanctions?”

The movie will be released once the appeal is over with the conclusion of the story of the Pirate Bay’s lawsuit, however it ends. Although it’ll be mostly in Swedish, there’ll be subtitles openly available for people who want to translate them. It’ll be available free in Ogg Theora on BitTorrent, and it’ll also be purchasable on DVD for, Klose says, “people who wish to support the filmmakers”.

“TPB AFK is not a fan movie about the Pirate Bay,” says Klose. “Neither is it a journalistic piece on copyright conflict. It’s an observational, character driven film about three guys whose hobby homepage became the embryo of a global political movement.”

See Also:

• Lost Hacking Documentary Surfaces on Pirate Bay
• Studios Demand Court Shutter Pirate Bay
• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke issued a blistering diatribe against music piracy Monday, declaring it “a growing threat” that “should be dealt with accordingly.”

“This isn’t just an issue of right and wrong,” Locke said in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the nation’s musical focal points. “This is a fundamental issue of America’s economic competitiveness.”

Borrowing a page from the Hollywood and recording studios, Locke urged internet service providers and content owners “to work collaboratively to combat intellectual property infringement online.”

“Especially to combat repeat infringement,” he added.

Locke’s statements came a week after Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, declared that copyright law “isn’t working” because internet service providers are allowed to turn a blind eye to customers’ unlawful activities with impunity.  Hollywood and recording studios have been pushing for the removal of online pirates from the internet in what is largely known as “three strikes” or “graduated response” policy.

The Commerce Department, Locke said, is preparing to craft an “administration-wide policy on copyright protection and innovation.”

“At the Commerce Department, we are trying to figure out how we shut out the pirates, while preserving the internet as an avenue for commerce for music and for other creative industries,” Locke added.

He said the internet was a “double-edged sword” for the industry.

“On the one hand, online copyright infringement is a growing threat, with cyberlockers as well as peer-to-peer, file sharing, streaming and user generated content sites providing a constant challenge to the music industry,” he said. “But the internet, if used correctly, can be a great growth engine.”

See Also:

• ACTA Backs Away From 3 Strikes
• AT&T, Comcast Deny RIAA ‘Three-Strikes’ Participation
• MPAA Wants Congress to ‘Encourage’ 3 Strikes, Filtering
• ISP Agrees to Ban Copyright Scofflaws
• Copyright Lawsuits Plummet in Aftermath of RIAA Campaign
• Leaner RIAA Still Moving to Terminate Online Access of Copyright Scofflaws
• Obama: Stop Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders

A top British codebreaker found mysteriously dead last week in his flat had worked with the NSA and British intelligence to intercept e-mail messages that helped convict would-be bombers in the U.K., according to a news report.

Gareth Williams, 31, made repeated visits to the U.S. to meet with the National Security Agency and worked closely with British and U.S. spy agencies to intercept and examine communications that passed between an al Qaeda official in Pakistan and three men who were convicted last year of plotting to bomb transcontinental flights, according to the British paper the Mirror.

Williams, described by those who knew him as a “math genius,” worked for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) helping to break coded Taliban communications, among other things. He was just completing a year-long stint with MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, when his body was found stuffed into a duffel bag in his bathtub. He’d been dead for at least a week. His mobile phone and a number of SIM cards were laid out on a table near the body, according to news reports. There were no signs of forced entry to the apartment and no signs of a struggle.

Initial news stories indicated Williams had been stabbed, but police have since disputed that information, noting that — other than being stuffed into a duffel bag — there were no obvious signs of foul play. A toxicology report is expected Tuesday.

The NSA wiretaps the internet from this secured room in an AT&T building in San Francisco, and similar rooms around the U.S., according to whistleblower Mark Klein.

Investigators say they haven’t ruled out the possibility that the codebreaker was killed over something related to his work. Rumors that sexual bondage equipment was found in his apartment were also nixed by police, who said the rumors were untrue and they found no evidence yet to suggest that anything in Williams’ personal life led to his death.

Williams, an avid cyclist, lived in an apartment in Pimlico in central London that was reportedly part of a network of flats registered to an offshore front company and rented out to GCHQ workers.  He is believed to have returned from a trip abroad on August 11. He was last seen alive on August 15, eight days before his body was found.

Williams flew up to four times a year to the U.S. to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade HQ, according to the Mirror. His uncle, Michael Hughes, told the paper that Williams would mysteriously disappear for three or four weeks.

“The trips were very hush-hush,” Hughes said. “They were so secret that I only recently found out about them – and we’re a very close family. It had become part of his job in the past few years. His last trip out there was a few weeks ago, but he was regularly back and forth.”

Williams was said to have worked with the NSA on e-mails intercepted between Abdullah Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar and Rashid Rauf, a British national in Pakistan who was allegedly director of European operations for al Qaeda. The e-mails, intercepted by the NSA in 2006, allegedly contained coded messages.

The NSA shared the e-mails with British prosecutors but wouldn’t allow them to use the evidence in an early trial of the suspects out of fear of tipping off Rauf that he was under surveillance. It was only after Rauf was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone attack that the NSA allowed prosecutors to use the e-mails to convict the other suspects. It’s never been known whether the NSA intercepted the messages overseas or siphoned them as they passed through internet nodes on U.S. soil as part of the NSA’s controversial and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program.

An unidentified Western intelligence source told the Mirror that Williams’ job would have had him participating in “crucial high-level meetings with American intelligence officers. His job would have been crucial to the security of the UK and our interests abroad – and also to America and Europe.

“Although not particularly high up the GCHQ ladder, the importance of his role should not be underestimated. The man was a mathematical genius.”

His landlady, Jenny Elliott, told the Telegraph, “Occasionally you could hear tapes whirring from his flat, which must have been audio cassettes he used for work, but he never told me what they were.”

See Also:

• NSA-Intercepted E-Mails Helped Convict Would-Be Bombers
• Lawyers Who Won NSA Spy Case Demand $2.63 Million
• Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA’s Wiretapping of Americans
• Stumbling Into a Spy Scandal

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former intelligence analyst suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, has hired a civilian attorney to defend him, according to a report.

David Coombs, a former U.S. Army attorney in Rhode Island, was named as Manning’s new attorney, according to the Associated Press.

According to his web site, Coombs’s civilian practice specializes in military court martial cases. He has handled military cases involving murder, robbery, drugs and sexual assault. His most high-profile case involved defending Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who was charged in 2003 with attacking and killing fellow U.S. soldiers in Kuwait. Akbar is currently awaiting execution for murdering two officers.

Coombs, who is in the Army Reserves, is also a former law professor at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It’s not known if Coombs already has a clearance to handle classified materials that may be introduced as evidence in Manning’s case.

Coombs did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

Pfc. Bradley Manning

Manning was charged last month with leaking the Iraq video, and improperly downloading more than 150,000 State Department cables onto his unclassified personal computer. He’s charged with leaking more than 50 of them. The Pentagon has described Manning as a “person of interest” in the leaking of the 92,000-entry Afghan war log partially published by WikiLeaks last month.

WikiLeaks has never acknowledged that Manning is a source. Nonetheless the site as well as a number of other organizations and websites have been raising funds for Manning’s defense.

Manning has been assigned a team of three Army attorneys. It’s unclear if they will remain on his case as co-counsel with Coombs.

Top image: In this courtroom sketch, David Coombs (far left) sits next to Sgt. Hasan Akbar during the sentencing phase of Akbar’s court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C. April 25, 2005. (AP Photo/U.S. Army, Stacey Robinson)

See also

• Mississippi Lawyer Drawn Into WikiLeaks Intrigue
• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
• WikiLeaks Suspect’s YouTube Videos Raised ‘Red Flag’ in 2008
• WikiLeaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs — Is Iraq Next?
• Suspected WikiLeaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain.

Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement.

Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media. Righthaven has issued more than 100 lawsuits since its spring inception on behalf of the Las Vegas Review Journal — Stephens’ flagship.

“I can tell you we also have near finalization for contracts with a substantial number of other publishers,” Gibson said in a telephone interview. He declined to divulge their names until Righthaven begins filing suits on their behalf.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has received “several dozen” inquiries from Righthaven defendants seeking legal representation, said Eva Galperin, the EFF’s referral coordinator.

“We’re up to our armpits in Righthaven defendants,” she said in a telephone interview.

The EFF, she said, has yet to take a case and has been helping the defendants obtain other counsel, she said.

For its part, WEHCO controls 28 papers, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and 13 cable stations largely in the south. Its president, Paul Smith, said in a Democrat-Gazette story last week that “it’s a pretty serious matter when someone takes your copy, information you’ve spent a lot of money to produce.”

Smith did not return a telephone message seeking comment.

In July, Gibson told Threat Level that more Righthaven clients would be forthcoming. He also gave a brief accounting of how Righthaven works. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, Righthaven acquires the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.

Righthaven usually demands $75,000, but will settle for a few thousand dollars.

(Photo courtesy Steve Gibson, Righthaven)

See Also:

• Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits
• Copyright Troll Loses High-Stakes Unix Battle
• It’s Baaaack … Appeals Court Resurrects SCO Lawsuit
• ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws
• Judge: Copyright Owners Must Consider ‘Fair Use’
• Proposed Copyright Law a ‘Gift’ to Hollywood, Info Groups Say
• DMCA Abuser Apologizes, Will Take Copyright Law Course
• Study: Fair Use Contributes Trillions to U.S. Economy

An alleged carder arrested earlier this month in France has been added to a long list of defendants charged with participating in the coordinated $9.5 million global heist against Atlanta-based card processing company RBS WorldPay, in a revised federal indictment issued in Georgia last week.

Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, aka BadB, was charged with one count each of wire fraud and access device fraud for his alleged role in the caper authorities have called “perhaps the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attack ever conducted.” On Nov. 8, 2008, an army of cashers armed with cloned payroll cards simultaneously hit more than 2,000 ATMs around the world, looting them of $9.5 million in less than a day.

Horohorin’s indictment comes as U.S. law enforcement is enjoying once-unheard of success in targeting overseas cybercrime suspects. Another RBS WorldPay suspect, Sergei Tsurikov, 25, was extradited to the United States from Estonia earlier this month. And last month the FBI worked with international authorities to win the arrest of a suspected creator of the Mariposa botnet in Slovenia, and three alleged bot herders in Spain.

According to the superseding indictment (.pdf) filed Aug. 24, Horohorin used a prepaid payroll card with an RBS account number and associated PIN to hit cash machines around Moscow, where $125,000 of the ATM fraud occurred.

Horohorin, who holds dual citizenship in Ukraine and Israel, was already facing extradition to the United States on charges of access device fraud and identity theft from a separate indictment (.pdf) filed in Washington, D.C. last November. He was arrested in Nice, France, while boarding a flight to Russia, where he had been living.

Horohorin was allegedly one of the earliest members of CarderPlanet, a first of its kind Russian-language carding forum that was launched around 2002 by a group of East Europeans. CarderPlanet was shuttered in 2004, and BadB had more recently been selling his stolen goods at carder.su and on his own websites, dumps.name and badb.biz, where he promoted his product in lighthearted Flash cartoons like the one above.

According to authorities, Horohorin bragged online that he was one of the biggest sellers of “dumps” (account and other data stored on a bank card’s magnetic stripe) and had been a card seller for about eight years. Undercover agents from the U.S. Secret Service negotiated purchases of stolen data from him and worked with French authorities to arrest him.

But according to the new indictment in Georgia, Horohorin’s profits came not just from selling stolen card data but from cashing out compromised accounts as well. Horohorin is now one of nine suspects identified so far as participants in the RBS WorldPay heist, though his role in that attack appears to have been minor compared to his fellow defendants.

The hack involved reverse-engineering PINs for payroll debit card accounts — the holy grail of bank card hacking.

RBS WorldPay, the payment-processing arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland, provides a number of electronic payment processing services, including debit card transactions, electronic benefits transfer payments (EBT), prepaid cards, credit card and ATM-processing services. The processor discovered in November 2008 that it had been hacked and that the intruders had accessed account details for 100 payroll cards — offered by some employers as a paperless alternative to paychecks.

The hackers compromised RBS WorldPay’s database encryption to raise the amount of funds available on the compromised cards, and boost their daily withdrawal limits. In some case, the hackers raised the limits to $500,000. They allegedly developed a method for reverse engineering the encrypted PINs on the accounts.

Once the hackers raised the account limits, they provided their cashers with 44 cards programmed with the account details. On Nov. 8 of that year, the cashers — Horohorin allegedly among them — simultaneously hit more than 2,000 ATMs, netting about $9.5 million in under 12 hours.

The hackers were able to observe the withdrawals of funds from ATMs in real time in order to monitor the amounts being taken by cashers and lock the accounts to prevent further withdrawals. Once the mission was completed, the hackers tried to erase their tracks on the RBS network.

Viktor Pleshchuk, 28, of St. Petersburg, was the alleged mastermind of the hack. He was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service, earlier this year.

Pleshchuk was indicted in the United States last November with Sergei Tsurikov, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; Oleg Covelin, 28, of Chisinau, Moldova; and a fourth person identified only as “Hacker 3.” Igor Grudijev, 32, Ronald Tsoi, 32, Evelin Tsoi, 21, and Mihhail Jevgenov, 34, all of Tallinn, Estonia, were also indicted on access device fraud charges related to the hack.

Tsurikov, Grudijev, Jevgenov and both Ronald and Evelin Tsoi were convicted in Estonia of fraud. Tsurikov was extradited to the United States earlier this month.

Horohorin was already facing a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted on the access device fraud charge in Washington, D.C. as well as an additional 2 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 if convicted of the identity theft charge. He faces similar maximum sentences for the new charges in Georgia.

(Story updated 15:45 EDT)

See also:

• Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ Busted in France
• Suspect in RBS WorldPay Hack Extradited to the U.S.
• 4 Hackers Indicted in $9.5 Million Bank Card Attack
• 5 More Indicted in Probe of International Carding Ring
• PIN Crackers Nab Holy Grail of Bank Card Security
• Big Box Breach: The Inside Story of Wal-Mart’s Hacker Attack
• Global ATM Caper Nets Hackers $9 Million in One Day

What the heck is that blue box on top of the Small Dome at MIT? Students starting school this week at the venerable geek institution were wondering that themselves. Let’s take a closer look …

Yep, it turns out that the Doctor is stopping by to give the first lecture in 6.01, the infamously hard and awesome introduction to computer science class. The Doctor, of course, remembers when it was called 6.001.

You can see a whole history of MIT hacks on the campus website.

via BBCAmericanGirl on Flickr

Thanks, Ria!

Social-networking upstart Teachbook said Wednesday it would challenge a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by Facebook, which is demanding the teacher-oriented site remove “book” from its name.

“It’s a David and Goliath situation,” said Greg Shrader, the managing partner of the Northbrook, Illinois-base Teachbook, which has yet to launch.  ”They’re throwing bombs at a mosquito. They believe we’re going to roll over and in some respect they get to own the term ‘book.’”

Facebook, in a lawsuit Threat Level reported on Tuesday, claims the term “book” cannot be used to name social-networking sites. The Palo Alto-based site claims Teachbook might dilute its famous name or cause confusion over which is the real Facebook.

Facebook doesn’t seem to be focused solely on social-networking sites, either. It leveraged its financial weight earlier this month to demand an upstart travel site to rename itself from Placebook.

Photo: Andross/Flickr

See Also:

• Judge Doesn’t Give Tiffany a Trademark Silver Spoon in eBay Flap
• GOP ‘Caving’ on Trademark Lawsuit Threats
• Sex Writer Violet Blue Sues Porn Star Violet Blue Over Name
• Think Godzilla’s Scary? Meet His Lawyers

WikiLeaks dug into its trove of unpublished leaks Wednesday to release a six-month-old classified CIA memo about foreign perception of the United States, underscoring that the secret-spilling website won’t be cowed by Pentagon threats, nor derailed by the Swedish legal problem now circling its leader.

The memo, classified Secret, asks, “What if Foreigners See the United States as an ‘Exporter of Terrorism?’” Dated February 2, 2010, it was produced by the CIA’s “Red Cell,” a brainstorming team established in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to provide an “alternative viewpoint” in the intelligence community.

The release is the second CIA Red Cell document published by WikiLeaks. In March, the site published another Secret memo analyzing possible PR strategies to shore up public support in Europe for the war in Afghanistan.

The new leak is less impactful. It notes several occasions on which Americans have joined up with, or provided financial aid to, extremist groups abroad, and asks how American foreign relations would suffer if the United States started being viewed as a terror-exporting state.

“These sorts of analytic products — clearly identified as coming from the Agency’s ‘Red Cell’ — are designed simply to provoke thought and present different points of view,” CIA spokesman George Little said in a statement Wednesday.

The document’s meta message, though, is not likely to be lost on the U.S. government. The release is the first classified U.S. document published by WikiLeaks since the Pentagon formally demanded Aug. 5 that WikiLeaks delete its entire cache of classified material, which could also include 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables, and a log of events from the Iraq war containing 500,000 documents. Both were purportedly leaked by now-imprisoned Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

Julian Assange (Lily Mihalik/Wired.com).

The Pentagon’s demand — repeated in a letter to a WikiLeaks lawyer last week — came after WikiLeaks published a detailed and mostly classified log of 77,000 events in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Some of those records contain the names of Afghan informants, who now face potentially deadly reprisal from the Taliban.

WikiLeaks’ publication of the names has drawn criticism from human rights organizations and the international free-press group Reporters Without Borders.

WikiLeaks withheld an additional 15,000 documents from its website until it could remove information that could put more Afghans in jeopardy.

At a press conference in Stockholm on Wednesday, Assange said WikiLeaks has so far gone through 8,000 of those remaining documents. (Three newspapers, including The New York Times, already received an unedited copy of the entire Afghan logs from WikiLeaks last month.)

Also on Wednesday, prosecutors in Sweden announced they are pressing ahead with an investigation into Assange’s conduct with a woman he reportedly encountered in his ongoing visit to that country. Assange is suspected of the crime of “molestation” — a broad offense under Swedish law that can include reckless conduct or unwelcome physical contact with another adult. The offense is the Swedish equivalent of a misdemeanor, carrying the potential for a fine and up to a year in jail.

A more serious allegation involving a different woman led to the issuance of an arrest warrant against Asssange last Friday, but it was dropped just hours later, after prosecutors reviewed the facts and determined they didn’t constitute a crime.

Assange has denied any wrongdoing, and hinted that both complaints are the result of a U.S. plot against WikiLeaks — leading some supporters of the group to publicly investigate the two women and their families.

See also

• Mississippi Lawyer Drawn Into WikiLeaks Intrigue
• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
• WikiLeaks Suspect’s YouTube Videos Raised ‘Red Flag’ in 2008
• WikiLeaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs — Is Iraq Next?
• Suspected WikiLeaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe

Facebook has sued a little-known website for educators called Teachbook, claiming Facebook literally owns the “book” when it comes to naming social networking sites.

“Misappropriating the distinctive book portion of Facebook’s trademark, defendant has created its own competing online networking community in a blatant attempt to become a Facebook for teachers,” (.pdf) according to a filing in San Francisco federal court.

Facebook, with some 500 million users, is policing its trademark in a bid to prevent others from capitalizing on its famous name or diluting its value.

Facebook is not alone in pursuing trademark actions to protect household-name recognition. Facebook’s lawsuit follows recent threatened litigation by Best Buy against a Wisconsin priest who outfitted a Volkswagen beetle to look like Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” vehicle. The priest had painted “God Squad” on the beetle, but has since agreed to remove it.

Facebook’s lawsuit Wednesday seeks unspecified damages and demands a judge order Teachbook, of Northbrook, Illinois, to immediately cease using “book” in its name.

This begs the obvious question: Would Facebook sue a social-networking site for priests named Goodbook? Or a librarian-networking site named Librarybook?

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, pointed out that “we have no complaint against Kelly Blue Book or Green Apple Books or others.”

“However, there is already a well known online network of people with ‘book’ in the brand name. Of course the Teachbook folks are free to create an online network for teachers or whomever, and we wish them well in that endeavor,” he said in an e-mail. “What they are not free to do is trade on our name or dilute our brand while doing so.”

Teachbook declined immediate comment.

It bills itself as a “professional community for teachers” where they are encouraged to share lesson plans and instructional videos, and to manage “communications with parents and students.”

No hearing date has been set.

Top photo: seychelles88/Flickr
Bottom photo: Franco Bouly/Flickr

See Also:

• Appeals Court Sides With eBay in Tiffany Trademark Suit
• China Pledges WTO Copyright, Trademark Cooperation
• Judge Doesn’t Give Tiffany a Trademark Silver Spoon in eBay Flap
• GOP ‘Caving’ on Trademark Lawsuit Threats
• Sex Writer Violet Blue Sues Porn Star Violet Blue Over Name
• Think Godzilla’s Scary? Meet His Lawyers
• ‘Pull My Finger’ iPhone Fart App Dispute Lingers
• Top Security Firm RSA Tries to Silence Blog

It turns out paperless touchscreen voting machines are actually good for something after all. Two computer-security researchers recently hacked this Sequoia AVC Edge to play the classic arcade videogame Pac-Man. They picked up the machine after it was decommissioned in Virginia in a statewide purge of paperless voting machines.

J. Alex Halderman, of the University of Michigan, and Ariel J. Feldman from Princeton University simply swapped out the machine’s PCMCIA card — where the voting software is stored — and replaced it with one loaded with Pac-Man. They pulled this off without disturbing the tamper-evident seals on the machine. They simply unscrewed the compartment where the card is housed, and slipped in their home-brewed version.

No word on plans to give Ms. Pac-Man suffrage.

Kurt William Havelock in an undated photo provided by the Maricopa County Sheriff's office.

An Arizona man who plotted a massacre outside the 2008 Super Bowl had his conviction overturned Monday by a federal appeals court because his snailmailed death threats went to no specific targets.

The case concerned Kurt William Havelock, who drove to the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, with a newly purchased assault rifle and dozens of rounds of ammunition with the intent to kill. “It will be swift and bloody,” he wrote media outlets in packages mailed a half hour before he got cold feet and abandoned his plan. “I will sacrifice your children upon the altar of your excess.”

With the prodding of his father, he turned himself in to local police. Federal authorities charged him with six counts of mailing threatening letters. The defendant was convicted on all charges and sentenced to a year in prison.

During the trial and on appeal, the 40-year-old, who was disgruntled that he was denied a liquor permit to open a bar, argued that he committed no crime at all. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a 2-1 decision.

Under the threatening-letters statute, “the ‘person’ to whom the mail is addressed must be an individual person, not an institution or corporation,” wrote Judge William Canby, who was joined by Judge Betty Fletcher. Havelock’s communications were mailed to media outlets, not named individuals, the majority noted.

In dissent, Judge Susan Graber wrote, “The result of the majority’s interpretation is that the statute prohibits sending a threatening communication only if the outside of the envelope or package explicitly directs delivery to a natural person.”

Havelock sent the threatening letters addressed to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Phoenix New Times, The Associated Press and the websites theshizz.org and azpunk.com. “I will slay your children. I will shed the blood of the innocent,” he wrote.

The law, the San Francisco-based appeals court wrote, “does indeed require that the mailed item containing the threat is addressed to an individual person, as reflected in the address on the mailed item. Because Havelock’s communications were not so addressed to individual persons, we reverse his convictions.”

Havelock was not immediately reachable. Neither his attorney nor federal prosecutors responded for comment.

Here is the federal statute in question:

Whoever knowingly so deposits or causes to be delivered [by the Postal Service according to the direction thereon], any communication with or without a name or designating mark subscribed thereto, addressed to any other person and containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of the addressee or of another, shallNo- be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

Judge Graber argued that the conviction should stand. Congress, she wrote, adopted the law “to protect individuals from mailed threats of kidnapping, ransom demands, threats of bodily injury or death, and certain other serious threats.”

Graber said the appeals court “should interpret the word ‘person’ in a statute as including corporations and several other types of entities unless the context shows otherwise.”

Photo: Associated Press

See Also:

• Hate Blogger Convicted of Threats After Three Trials
• Woman Jailed for Texting Threats to Herself
• Court: Cyberbullying Threats Are Not Protected Speech
• Top Internet Threats: Censorship to Warrantless Surveillance
• MySpace Diatribe Brings Death Threats
• Oklahoma Man Arrested for Twittering Tea Party Death Threats
• Lawyer: FBI Paid Right-Wing Blogger Charged With Threats

A security researcher in India has been arrested after he refused to provide authorities with the name of a person who supplied him with an electronic voting machine that was used to discover vulnerabilities in the system. The researcher had used the machine to demonstrate how someone could hack voting systems to easily subvert an election.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, nearly a dozen police converged on the home of Hari Prasad, managing director of Netindia, to question him about the source of the voting machine he received. After refusing to identify his source, he was reportedly arrested under suspicion of theft and receiving stolen property.

The voting system was allegedly taken from a storage facility at the district election office in Mumbai. It was reported missing on May 12, after Prasad disclosed on a television program in India that he had received a machine from an anonymous source. It’s not clear why it took authorities so long to act on the report, but the arrest comes about a week after two representatives of the India Election Commission got into a heated debate about the country’s machines, during a panel discussion at an electronic voting conference (.mp3) in Washington, D.C.

Following that discussion, 28 computer security researchers signed a letter to India’s election commission (.pdf) stating that the country’s voting machines “do not today provide security, verifiability, or transparency adequate for confidence in election results.”

India uses proprietary paperless electronic voting machines nationwide. The systems were developed by two government-controlled companies.

Despite concerns expressed by a number of the country’s political parties, election officials have insisted that the machines are secure and tamper-proof. In a press release following Prasad’s arrest, the election commission wrote:

“While the Commission has every respect for technologists and is always open to suggestions for improvement in the voting system, it cannot overlook any illegal act, especially the theft of a public property like the EVM given in its custody for conduct of elections.”

Last year Prasad challenged the election commission to prove that the machines were secure, but the commission refused to allow the voting systems to be independently examined. Then in February this year, an anonymous source provided Prasad with a machine that had been used in elections.

Prasad examined the system with two other researchers, J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, and Dutch hacker and longtime e-voting activist Rop Gonggrijp.

They demonstrated two attacks (see below) that could be conducted against the machines. One involves replacing a digital display board on the machine with a look-alike part that could be used to receive instruction from the hackers — sent wirelessly via a mobile phone — to steal votes for a candidate. The second attack uses a small device that connects to the machine’s memory to change votes stored on a machine after the election, before the votes are counted.

Halderman says the researchers believe the person who gave them the voting machine had legal access to it and provided it in the interest of transparency and scientific study. Halderman spoke with Prasad on the phone while he was in the back of a police car on Saturday (see audio above). Prasad told Halderman that the police had no choice but to arrest him, since they were receiving pressure from above.

“This kind of intimidation will hit the hearts of volunteers, and no volunteer will come forward if this kind of thing happens in future,” Prasad said during the phone call. “That’s the reason I’m going to take it on and I’ll face it, so that the volunteers get inspired by me. And the ultimate goal is we have to achieve that these machines are not fit enough for elections.”

A California appeals court has overturned a Los Angeles judge’s order that prohibited the Los Angeles Times from publishing a photo of a quadruple murder defendant.

“We conclude the superior court’s order precluding publication of photographs lawfully taken unconstitutionally violates the prohibition against prior restraint of speech,” (.pdf) the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles ruled Thursday in a First Amendment challenge brought by the newspaper.

The constitutional flap began three weeks ago, when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Hilleri Merritt ordered the Times not to publish photos of defendant Alberd Tersargyan after previously granting the paper the go-ahead to snap pictures during a pretrial proceeding.

The case threatened a dangerous First Amendment precedent. The U.S. Supreme Court has never tolerated prior restraint, even in the 1971 “Pentagon Papers” case. Then, the justices refused to block The New York Times from publishing sensitive documents concerning the nation’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

Judge Merritt had halted her order granting the Los Angeles Times the right to take photos midway through the hearing. The defendant’s counsel had argued that his fair-trial rights could be prejudiced because of a dispute involving “the integrity of eyewitness identification” — even though other photos of Tersargyan had been widely circulated in print and the internet.

See Also:

• Yahoo Spouts First Amendment Doublespeak
• Judge Says Constitution Protects Right to Lie About Purple Heart
• Judge Rules Post on Cop-Rating Site is Protected Speech
• Rulings Leave Online Student Speech Rights Unresolved
• Prison Awaiting Hostile Bloggers
• ‘Skanks’ Blogger Unmasked by Google Vows to Sue Company
• Student’s Facebook Tirade Against Teacher Is Protected Speech
• MySpace Diatribe Brings Death Threats

Whether Google is liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers across the United States is to be aired out in a Silicon Valley federal court.

Eight proposed class actions from across the country that seek unspecified monetary damages from Google were consolidated this week and transferred to U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California. Another five cases are likely to join.

The lawsuits allege that Google violated federal and state privacy laws in collecting fragments of data from unencrypted wireless networks as its fleet of camera-equipped cars moseyed through neighborhoods snapping pictures for its Street View program.

The consolidation decision (.pdf) by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation is likely to spark a legal frenzy by attorneys involved in the cases, as they jockey to win over Judge Ware and garner lead counsel status. That would give those lawyers intense media attention, as well as the biggest share in legal fees from a verdict or settlement.

Still, acquiring lead counsel status, a title given to lawyers whom the judge believes can best represent the interests of class members, comes with a huge risk as well.

The deep-pocketed Google maintains that it did nothing wrong, and is likely to put up a fierce and costly defense. Google, in response to government inquiries and lawsuits, claims it is lawful to use packet-sniffing tools readily available on the internet to spy on and download payload data from others using the same open Wi-Fi access point.

So far, government regulators are not sure whether Google committed any legal wrongdoing. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced in June that as many as 30 attorneys general were examining the lawfulness of Google’s actions. Several other countries are probing the issue as well.

Mountain View, California-based Google called the inadvertent three-year-long collection “a mistake” and said it was the result of a programming error — code written for an early experimental project wound up in the Street View code, and Google says it did not realize the error until May, when German privacy authorities began questioning what data Google’s cameras were collecting.

The Panel on Multidistrict Litigation said it chose Silicon Valley because “Google is headquartered there, and most relevant documents and witnesses are likely located there.” The panel also said many of the lawyers in the case “support centralization” there.

Judge Ware, a President George H.W. Bush appointee, has not set an initial hearing date.

Photo: dspain/Flickr

See Also:

• Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing ‘Is Not an Accident’
• Former Prosecutor: Google Wi-Fi Snafu ‘Likely’ Illegal
• Privacy in Peril: Lawyers, Nations Clamor for Google Wi-Fi Data
• Consumer Group Sniffs Congresswoman’s Open Wi-Fi
• Google Street View Cams Collected Private Content From WiFi

A federal judge is allowing a negligence lawsuit to proceed against the publisher of the online virtual-world game Lineage II, amid allegations that a Hawaii man became so addicted he is “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.”

Craig Smallwood, the plaintiff, claims NCsoft of South Korea should pay unspecified monetary damages because of the addictive nature of the game. Smallwood claims to have played Lineage II for 20,000 hours between 2004 and 2009. Among other things, he alleges he would not have begun playing if he was aware “that he would become addicted to the game.”

Smallwood, who did not immediately respond for comment, alleged that the company “acted negligently in failing to warn or instruct or adequately warn or instruct plaintiff and other players of Lineage II of its dangerous and defective characteristics, and of the safe and proper method of using the game.”

Released in 2003 as a sequel to the original Lineage game, which was a national phenomenon in South Korea,  Lineage II is an immersion 3-D MMORPG that gained a reported 600,000 users within a few years, and is still being regularly expanded and updated six years later — all the better to turn more vulnerable Americans into bleary-eyed shut-ins.

U.S. District Judge Alan Kay refused to dismiss parts of Smallwood’s complaint this month, possibly clearing the way for a trial.  ”In light of plaintiff’s allegations, the court finds that plaintiff has stated a claim for both negligence and gross negligence,” Kay ruled (.pdf).

An attorney for the company was not immediately prepared to comment on Kay’s August 4 decision. But in a Tuesday court filing, NCsoft again urged the judge to dismiss the case.

See Also:

• Supreme Court Takes On Videogame Sales to Kids
• Clinton Would Crack Down on Computer-Generated Cartoon Sex
• Student Arrested for Jailbreaking Game Consoles — Update
• Bill Maher on Hillary Clinton 3AM Call Of Duty Video Game
• U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World
• Reiser Murder Trial: Divorce Was ‘Hostile;’ Couple Fought Over Video Games

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and spokesman Daniel Schmitt in Germany, 2009. Photo: Jacob Appelbaum/Flickr

A civil litigation attorney in Mississippi who has lent advice to WikiLeaks on occasion has found himself embroiled in intrigue and headlines after initiating conversation with the government over the secret-spilling site.

Timothy Matusheski, who specializes in litigation around False Claims Act violations, landed in the middle of a he said-he said fight Wednesday after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed that the U.S. military had reached out to WikiLeaks. Assange told the Associated Press that the Pentagon wanted to discuss the possibility of working with WikiLeaks to help redact sensitive information from the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs that WikiLeaks plans to publish soon.

The Defense Department immediately disputed the claim, and asserted it had neither contacted WikiLeaks nor had any intention of working with the organization. A Defense Department spokesman later revised that statement slightly saying the DoD had come across someone “purporting” to be an attorney for WikiLeaks and had scheduled a phone conversation with him for last Sunday morning, but the attorney was a no-show for the call. The Pentagon released a letter sent to the attorney, Matusheski, discussing the missed call.

The spokesman and the letter re-asserted that the Defense Department has no plans, nor did it ever have plans, to work with WikiLeaks to redact information.

Matusheski confirmed to Threat Level on Wednesday that the military had indeed approached him, but not about the Afghan documents and only after he had contacted authorities first, several weeks ago.

Matusheski said that he received a call last week from Chuck Ames, an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, which is working on the case of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army private suspected of having leaked classified information to WikiLeaks.

Ames was interested in setting up a meeting with Assange, Matusheski said. But he never mentioned any documents WikiLeaks possessed, or suggested the government would be interested in working with WikiLeaks to redact sensitive information. That suggestion came from Matusheski himself, who thought it would be a good idea for the Army to view the documents “so that if anything gets published, they would have advance notice of it and could do some damage-control,” Matusheski said.

Matusheski said Assange had told him previously that he had already set up a network interface where the government could access all of the documents and make comments on them and suggest redactions. When Matusheski suggested to Ames that the government might be given access to the documents, Ames told him he didn’t have authority to discuss or consider the offer and would have to get back to him. Matusheski said he made the suggestion without consulting with WikiLeaks first.

Matusheski said he never scheduled a phone call with Ames, and was asleep on Sunday morning when he received voicemail messages from Ames asking Matusheski to call him back. The messages didn’t mention a missed meeting. Matusheski said he called Ames and got his voicemail. Ames later sent him an e-mail message saying to expect a letter to arrive via fax. This is the letter the Defense Department released to reporters on Wednesday (see below), asserting that the government had no intention of working with WikiLeaks.

How did Matusheski find himself tiptoeing through the landmine-filled battlefield between WikiLeaks and the US. government?

Matusheski first contacted the government himself after news broke in June that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning had been arrested under suspicion of having leaked classified data to WikiLeaks. Matusheski said he’d been chatting online with Assange, who told him to look up Manning’s name. Matusheski did a quick search and was surprised to learn the details of Manning’s arrest and see stories indicating that the government was looking for Assange.

Matusheski immediately contacted the FBI, without telling Assange, and identified himself as an attorney representing Assange. He offered to answer any questions the FBI had about Assange, as long as they didn’t violate the attorney-client privilege.

That privilege had limits, however. Matusheski said if authorities convinced him that Assange was about to commit a crime, he’d tell them everything they needed to know.

“I said if you can show me some evidence that he is about to commit a crime, obviously under the rules of ethics I would have to divulge that information to you,” Matusheski said. “If he’s going to do anything that is criminal, if he puts people’s lives at risk and you show me evidence of that, I said I’ll take him down if I have to. I’ll do whatever I have to do, I’ll tell you everything he’s ever told me.”

He also told authorities that he believed Assange was in Iceland. Authorities, however, told him that Assange was not the subject of an investigation.

Matusheski said he was acting as a “concerned citizen” but also out of concern for himself. He assumed the government would discover at some point that he’d been in contact with Assange and didn’t want any surprise visits.

“Because if I had been communicating with [Assange], I’m sure the government knows it, because the government records everything,” he said. “Eventually they would wonder what I had talked with him about, so I said look I have talked to him. I’m being open about this.”

A week or two after calling the FBI, Matusheski got his first call from Ames in the Army’s CID office. He asked Matusheski some questions — Matusheski doesn’t recall all of the details — and there was talk about meeting Assange.

Matusheski contacted Assange, who was “a little nervous about meeting [government investigators] because they might arrest him or something.”

The conversation with Ames, however, went no further, until the investigator called Matusheski last week to again discuss a meeting with Assange. Ames never disclosed the purpose of the meeting or brought up the Afghan documents.

An Army CID spokesman was not available to discuss Matusheski’s statements late Wednesday, but earlier in the day spokesman Christopher Grey had told Threat Level that Army CID was involved in “no way, shape, or form” in negotiations with WikiLeaks “concerning reviewing or redacting” the documents in WikiLeaks’s possession.

Asked if he is an official representative of WikiLeaks, Matusheski said, “I’ve given them legal advice.”

“To say I represent them, I think we have confidential communications. But if they got a suit filed against them, I probably wouldn’t handle it, but I give them advice, that’s my donation to the cause,” Matusheski said. “I give Julian and whoever else needs it. Typically it’s been Julian and Daniel Schmitt have asked me for advice.”

He wouldn’t say if Assange had asked him for advice regarding the Manning investigation and legal case or if he’d been asked to represent Manning.

The text of the letter to Matusheski from the Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, follows.

August 16, 2010

General Counsel of the Department of Defense
1600 Defense Pentagon
Washington, D.C. 20301-1600

Timothy J. Matusheski, Esq.
P.O. Box 15758
Hattiesburg, MS 39404

Re: WikiLeaks

Dear Mr. Matusheski:

Jeh Charles Johnson courtesy Defense Department

I understand that you represent yourself to be an attorney for WikiLeaks and that you, on behalf of that organization, sought a conversation with someone in the United States Government to discuss “harm minimization” with respect to some 15,000 U.S. Government classified documents that WikiLeaks is holding and is threatening to make public. In response, I was prepared to speak with you yesterday at 10:00 a.m. EDT and convey the position of the Department of Defense. Despite your agreement to be available by telephone yesterday morning, we could not reach you at that time.

The position of the Department of Defense is clear, and it should be conveyed to your client in no uncertain terms: WikiLeaks is holding the property of the U.S. Government, including classified documents and sensitive national security information that has not been authorized for release. Further, it is the view of the Department of Defense that WikiLeaks obtained this material in circumstances that constitute a violation of United States law, and that as long as WikiLeaks holds this material, the violation of the law is ongoing.

The Secretary of Defense has made clear the damage to our national security by the public release by WikiLeaks of some 76,000 classified documents several weeks ago, and the threat to the lives of coalition forces in Afghanistan and to the lives of local Afghan nationals as a result. As the Secretary has also stated, we know from various sources that our enemies are accessing the WikiLeaks website for the purpose of exploiting WikiLeaks’ illegal and irresponsible actions, to pursue their own terrorist aims.

The threatened release of additional classified documents by WikiLeaks will add to the damage. Among other sensitive items, we believe the classified documents contain, like the first batch of released documents, the names of Afghan nationals who are assisting coalition forces in our efforts to bring about peace and stability in that portion of the world.

Thus, the Department of Defense will not negotiate some “minimized” or “sanitized” version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional U.S. Government classified documents. The Department demands that nothing further be released by WikiLeaks, that of the U.S. Government classified documents that WikiLeaks has obtained be returned immediately, and that WikiLeaks remove and destroy all of these records from its databases.

Jeh Charles Johnson

See also

• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
• WikiLeaks Suspect’s YouTube Videos Raised ‘Red Flag’ in 2008
• WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File
• WikiLeaks Releases Stunning Afghan War Logs — Is Iraq Next?
• Suspected WikiLeaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe

Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,” (.pdf) the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

Friday’s decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.

The lawsuit concerns a family dispute over the making of a dying mother’s will. Days before the Connecticut woman died, her son secretly recorded a kitchen conversation between the son, mother, stepfather and others over how to handle her estate after her death.

The son, in a probate dispute, turned over the audio file to the court in 2008 to bolster his position concerning the estate of his late mother, who died without a will. The stepfather sued him, alleging a privacy breach under the Wiretap Act. A federal judge dismissed the case, and the stepfather appealed.

The appeals court ruled that, even if the son consented to his own taping, he could be sued for money damages for a breach of the Wiretap Act if and only if he did so with a nefarious intent.

“We affirm, and, in so doing, hold that the exception to the one-party consent provision of 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d) requires that a communication be intercepted for the purpose of a tortious or criminal act that is independent of the intentional act of recording,” the New York-based federal appeals court said.

Photo: Apple App Store

See Also:

• Police Wiretapping Jumps 26 Percent
• Court Says Bush Illegally Wiretapped Two Americans
• Bush’s Illegal Wiretapping Tab: $612000
• FBI, Telecoms Teamed to Breach Wiretap Laws
• Want a Wiretap Warrant? No Problem, Court Says
• Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse You