Maintaining internet privacy

Please take note, especially of the last paragraph -

“The New Zealand government is already  “aggressively”  eyeing legislation that will compel all internet service providers in the country to design a  “secret decryption access” for the intelligence agencies”

Mega to run ‘cutting-edge’ encrypted email after Lavabit’s ‘privacy seppuku’

Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is working on a highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server. It comes as the US squeezes email providers that offer encryption and Mega’s CEO calls Lavabit’s shutdown an “honorable act of Privacy Seppuku.”

RT,

11 August, 2013

Mega’s Chief Executive Vikram Kumar, who is heading the development of the company’s own end-to-end encryption technology to protect the privacy of the future email’s users, has reacted to the Lavabit founder’s decision to suspend his service’s operations – an act, which was shortly followed by voluntaryclosing down of another secure email service, Silent Circle. 

“These are acts of ‘Privacy Seppuku’ – honorably and publicly shutting down (“suicide”) rather than being forced to comply with laws and courts intent on violating people’s privacy,” Kumar said in his blog post.

The concept he was referring to was developed by secure service providers such as Cryptocloud, which made a ‘corporate seppuku’ pledge to oppose the mass surveillance and shield the privacy of their users’ data. The name for the move apparently derives from a Japanese ritual suicide, which was originally practiced by samurai to preserve honor.

According to Cryptocloud team’s board post cited by Kumar, “corporate seppuku” is “shutting down a company rather than agreeing to become an extension of the massive, ever-expanding, secretive global surveillance network organized by the US National Security Agency.”

This way, if the company receives a secret order from the NSA “to become a real-time participant in ongoing, blanket, secret surveillance of its customers,” it will not be forced into doing it. The pledge it made to its users will make it terminate itself instead, thus making the data mining impossible.

Such a policy manifests that “there is always a choice” for any company approached by the agents, while at the same time placing the users’ security in the highest priority. 

Owner and operator of Lavabit.com Ladar Levison on Thursday wrote that his nine-year-old encrypted email service was shutting down in order to avoid becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,”Silent Circle founder Jon Callas then wrote in a blog post.

But as Cryptocloud urged all the companies to make an ultimate privacy-protecting pledge, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said in an email to The Guardian that the internet giants are unlikely to join such action – although it could yield much greater results. He called for Google and Facebook to question their current stance, calling Lavabit’s owner decision “inspiring.”

“Employees and leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren’t fighting for our interests the same way small businesses are. The defense they have offered to this point is that they were compelled by laws they do not agree with, but one day of downtime for the coalition of their services could achieve what a hundred Lavabits could not,”Snowden said.

Mega doing ‘true crypto work for masses’ 

Meanwhile, Kumar has been involved in an email service project with what he says is exceptional level of encryption.

Mega has been doing an “exciting” but “very hard” and time-consuming job of developing both highly-secure and functional email service, Kumar told ZDNet.

“The biggest tech hurdle is providing email functionality that people expect, such as searching emails, that are trivial to provide if emails are stored in plain text (or available in plain text) on the server side. If all the server can see is encrypted text, as is the case with true end-to-end encryption, then all the functionality has to be built client side,” he explained, adding that even Silent Circle did not try to achieve such a feat.

“On this and other fronts, Mega is doing some hugely cutting-edge stuff. There is probably no one in the world who takes the Mega approach of making true crypto work for the masses, our core proposition,”Kumar said.

According to the company’s founder Dotcom, Mega doesn’t hold decryption keys to customer accounts and “never will”, thus making it impossible for it to read the emails. This also means that Mega by design cannot be forced to rat on its users by intelligence agencies.

However, Dotcom earlier told TorrentFreak that a new spy legislation being pushed by the US and its Five Eyes alliance partners – UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – may force Mega to relocate its servers to some country exempt from such jurisdictions, such as Iceland.

The New Zealand government is already “aggressively” eyeing legislation that will compel all internet service providers in the country to design a “secret decryption access” for the intelligence agencies, he said. 

'The Killers of Aaron Swartz Are Now Targeting Kim Dotcom'

Hollywood Studios Want Google to Censor Dotcom’s Mega

Torrent Freak

27 May, 2013

Two major Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove the homepage of Kim Dotcom’s Mega from its search results. Warner Bros. and NBC Universal claim that their copyrighted content is hosted on the URL and want it taken down. Dotcom is disappointed by the news and points out that constant takedown abuse is restricting access to legitimate files. “This is in line with the unreasonable content industry behavior we have experienced for years,” he says in a response.

Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.

Unfortunately not all of these requests are correct. Because of the high number of often automated notices and the fact that copyright holders don’t check the validity of all requests, this results in questionable takedowns.

One site that has been the target of this kind of takedown abuse is Kim Dotcom’s file-storage service Mega. In recent weeks Hollywood studios Warner Bros. and NBC Universal both asked Google to de-list Mega’s homepage from its search index. These are odd requests as Mega’s homepage doesn’t link to any files at all.

According to a takedown request by NBC Universal, however, Google is led to believe that Mega’s homepage is linking to an infringing copy of its film Mama. Warner Bros. on the other hand claim in a DMCA notice that Mega is making a pirated copy of Gangster Squad available to the public

NBC Universal takedown request

Kim Dotcom is not happy with the censorship attempt and points out that this is not the first time he has fallen victim to this kind of abuse.

“The Warner Bros. and NBC Universal requests to Google are censoring our entire homepage. This is in line with the unreasonable content industry behavior we have experienced for years,” Dotcom tells TorrentFreak.

“You will recall the illegal takedown of the Megaupload song by Universal Music and the attempts to censor our Mega radio ads. The shutdown of the entire Megaupload site remains the ultimate illegal takedown by the content industry.”

In this case, Google caught the error and refused to remove the Mega homepage, making it still available in its search results today. However, these kind of mistakes are certainly not an isolated incident. Dotcom points out that when Megaupload was still around one in five DMCA requests were bogus, often the result of automated processes.

“During the Megaupload days over 20% of all takedown notices were bogus. We analysed big samples of notices and most were automated keyword based takedowns that affected a lot of legitimate files. The abuse of the takedown system is so severe that no service provider can rely on takedown notices for a fair repeat infringer policy.”

Dotcom believes that instead of teaming up with Hollywood and protecting the interests of the copyright lobby, the White House should understand that the entertainment industries’ misuse of the DMCA has damaging consequences.

“The constant abuse of takedown rules and the ignorance of DMCA obligations by the content industry are based on the confidence that the current U.S. administration is protecting this kind of behavior. The political contract prosecution of Megaupload is the best example,” Dotcom tells us.

“The White House doesn’t appreciate that the DMCA was the biggest contributor to a thriving Internet economy in the U.S,” he adds.

The ‘mistakes’ by Warner Bros and NBC Universal show that wrongful takedown requests can seriously impede the availability of perfectly legal content. With millions of notices coming in each week Google can’t possibly correct all errors, as we’ve shown many times in the past.

Dotcom agrees, and points out that the copyright extremists are the problem, not the service providers like Mega.

“From my experience the only people who are acting like criminal lunatics are the copyright extremists who think that the DMCA doesn’t matter. Their agenda is war against innovation. The kind that forces the content industry to adjust an outdated business model.”

“History repeats itself and Innovation always wins,” Dotcom concludes.

RT interviews Kim Dotcom

Kim Dotcom Defies US Government

Abby Martin Breaks the Set on the Mega Upload case, Kim Dotcom's latest internet endeavor and comedian Lee Camp's take on current events.

Kim Dotcom launches Mega

Mega spectacle at launch of Kim Dotcom's new file-sharing site

Bravado and buffoonery at Auckland event as internet entrepreneur claims 250,000 signups in first two hours

Toby Manhire

the Guardian,

26 January, 2013

The internet entrepeneur Kim Dotcom boasted on Sunday that his new file-sharing service, Mega, was the fastest-growing startup in internet history.

In a bravado-filled launch at his estate north of Auckland, the German-born entrepreneur ramped up his counterattack on US prosecutors who argue that the site's predecessor, Megaupload, was at the heart of a "mega conspiracy", a "worldwide criminal organisation" enabling the exchange of copyright material.

"I've never seen anything like this," Dotcom said at an event that was equal parts press conference, polemic and buffoonery. "I've done a bit of PR and got a bit of attention, that's certainly helped. But I never expected 250,000 user registrations in the first two hours – I think it's unheard of. I don't know of any other startup that has had this kind of early success."

The site had more than a million visits in the first 14 hours, he said, with more than half a million registering for the service, which offers 50GB of free cloud-based data storage.

The launch was held at Dotcom's semi-rural home a year to the day after it was raided by New Zealand police in what was widely regarded as a bizarrely gung-ho operation at the behest of the FBI.

As if the timing and rhetoric were not enough, the import of the new enterprise was hammered home in an at times high-camp performance featuring a mock invasion of the estate, with gun-waving, balaclava-clad commandos descending the inner walls while a helicopter with "FBI" painted on the sides flew overhead.

Earlier a pair of comperes introduced Dotcom on stage as "a multimillionaire maniac, heavyweight champion, three-time Academy Award winner and qualified veterinarian".

US authorities are seeking the extradition of Dotcom and several of his associates to face charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering. Backed by Hollywood producers, they allege that Megaupload knowingly and willingly profited from the provision of a conduit for the exchange of pirated copyright materials. The US case has suffered a series of setbacks in New Zealand's courts.

The Motion Picture Association of America expressed scepticism about Mega. "We are still reviewing how this new project will operate, but we do know that Kim Dotcom has built his career and his fortune on stealing creative works," it said.

Dotcom says advanced encryption built into the new site is in part motivated by his growing awareness of the importance of privacy issues. In an interview with the Guardian before the Mega launch, he positioned himself as a leader in the movement for "internet freedom", and said his own experience of being illegally spied on – which resulted in a public apology from New Zealand's prime minister – had informed his thinking.

On Sunday night Dotcom said Megaupload had been unfairly targeted, and asserted that half of all internet traffic was pirated material. "They are trying to blame us for an internet phenomenon … You can ask any ISP that connects users to the internet, how much piracy traffic do you think you have on your network, and anyone who will tell you less than 50% is a liar. On the internet, piracy is so common that any internet company has to deal with the same issues," he said.

"They can't blame me for the actions of third parties. Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don't shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don't go to the car manufacturer and say, hey, we're shutting you down."

Kim Dotcom - THE Lawyer

Paul Davison QC vs. US Government