History > 2011 > USA > Internet (I)

A Social Networking Device for Smokers

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Companies have started adding the ability to communicate wirelessly to an increasing range of devices, like tablet computers, cars and refrigerators.

Now they are doing it with cigarettes.

Blu, the maker of electronic cigarettes that release a nicotine-laden vapor instead of smoke, has developed packs of e-cigarettes with sensors that will let users know when other e-smokers are nearby.

Think of it as social smoking for the social networking era.

“You’ll meet more people than ever, just because of the wow factor,” said Jason Healy, the founder of Blu, who did not appear to be making friends as he exhaled the odorless vapor of an e-cigarette at a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan recently. “It’s like with any new technology.”

E-cigarettes have several obvious advantages to their traditional counterparts. They allow users to avoid bans on smoking in public places because they release only water vapor. Mr. Healy and other e-cigarette manufacturers also claim that they have practically no negative health effects — an assertion that draws skepticism in many quarters. But the devices are also, in their own way, gadgets.

The new “smart packs,” which will go on sale next month for $80 for five e-cigarettes, are equipped with devices that emit and search for the radio signals of other packs. When they get within 50 feet of one another, the packs vibrate and flash a blue light.

The reusable packs, which serve as a charger for the cigarettes, can be set to exchange information about their owners, like contact information on social networking sites, that can be downloaded onto personal computers.

The packs also conveniently vibrate when a smoker nears a retail outlet that sells Blu cigarettes.

Later versions will be tethered to a smartphone through an app, allowing more options for real-time communication, Mr. Healy said. The company also plans to develop a system through which the packs will monitor how much people are smoking and report back to them — or to their doctors.

Marketers think people want more devices to link to each other. More than 105 million adult Americans have at least two types of connected devices, and 37 million have five or more, according to Forrester Research.

Nintendo’s new hand-held gaming systems, the 3DS, communicate with one another when brought into close proximity. A smartphone app called Color allows users to take photographs that are then automatically shared with anyone nearby who has also downloaded the app. It recently raised $41 million from venture capitalists.

But Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research who has studied connected devices, said that ideas like Blu’s connected cigarettes or Color show that digital connections can get ahead of the reasons for doing so.

“The way that groups of affinity are conferred just by physical proximity makes a bit of sense,” he said. “If someone walks by with a Nintendo, great, I share a common interest. The fact that I walk by a smoker? Seems like a weak link.”

Mr. Healy says he thinks the connected packs would be most useful in nightclubs, where people are interested in striking up conversations and want to smoke without being forced outside.

Adam Alfandary, 24, a Brooklyn resident who works for a technology start-up, was skeptical. He said that the social aspects of smoking were a part of the reason he continued to light up, but he scoffed at the idea of a cigarette that would do the social part for him. “I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said.

“And I’m saying that in full acknowledgment that smoking is one of the dumbest things I can do.”

    A Social Networking Device for Smokers, NYT, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/technology/11smoke.html

Social Networks Offer a Way to Narrow the Field of Friends

May 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

There are times when you just have to tell your friends about something — but not necessarily your Facebook friends.

Just ask Becca Akroyd. When Ms. Akroyd, a 29-year-old lawyer in Sacramento, Calif., wanted to share a picture of her new vegetable garden, she didn’t turn to Facebook. Instead she posted it on Path, a service that lets people share pictures, videos and messages with a small group.

“The people I have on my Path are the people who are going to care about the day-to-day random events in my life, or if my dog does something funny,” Ms. Akroyd said. “On Facebook, I have colleagues or family members who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in those things — and also that I wouldn’t necessarily want to have view those things.”

Path, which limits friend groups to 50, is among a new crop of Web services that allow people to connect with a handful of friends in a private group. Users get the benefits of sharing without the strangeness that can result when social worlds collide on Facebook. Other start-ups in this anti-oversharing crowd include GroupMe, Frenzy, Rally Up, Shizzlr, Huddl and Bubbla.

Even Facebook recognizes that people don’t want to share everything with every “friend.” It has privacy settings that control who can see what, but many people find these challenging to set up. So last fall, Facebook introduced Groups, for sharing with subsets of Facebook friends. And in March, it acquired Beluga, a start-up that allows sharing photos and messages with small groups privately.

Last month, Facebook said its users had created 50 million groups with a median of just eight members. It also introduced the Send button, which Web sites can use to let people share things with Facebook groups.

“We realized there wasn’t a way to share with these groups of people that were already established in your real life — family, book club members, a sports team,” said Peter Deng, director of product for Facebook Groups. “It’s one of the fastest-growing products within Facebook. Usage has been pretty phenomenal.”

Google is also working on tools for sharing with limited groups of people, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans who was not authorized to speak publicly. Slide, a maker of social networking apps that was bought by Google, recently released an iPhone app called Disco, for texting with small groups.

Google may discuss its plans in this area at a conference for developers this week. A spokeswoman, Katie Watson, declined to comment.

No one expects the start-ups in this field — most of which are new and have relatively few users — to replace Facebook or Twitter. Instead, their creators say that they do a better job of mimicking offline social relationships, and that they represent a new wave of social networking that revolves around specific tasks, like sharing photos or coordinating plans for the evening.

Shizzlr, for example, was created by two graduate business students at the University of Connecticut after they realized it was impossible to organize plans on Facebook.

“You put out a status about weekend plans and, all of a sudden, you get your uncle commenting that he wants to go hiking with you and your friends,” said Nick Jaensch, who created Shizzlr with Keith Bessette.

After users invite a few friends into a group on Shizzlr, the service grabs a list of coming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook and lets members discuss their options. The groups reach capacity at 20 people.

In the last three months, about 3,600 people have downloaded the application — a tiny number compared with Facebook’s 600 million members. But Mr. Jaensch says he is not interested in competing with Facebook.

“The people that you’ve called in the past two to three weeks are the people you actually do stuff with,” he said.

Shizzlr is just getting off the ground, but some of the other services in this field have attracted the attention of prominent investors. Path has raised $11 million from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. GroupMe, which says it is handling 100 million messages a month, raised $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and First Sound, and others. AOL acquired Rally Up late last summer.

Dave Morin, Path’s founder, was an early Facebook employee, but thought the social network had grown too large and impersonal for sharing certain things. Hundreds of thousands of users have agreed and signed up for Path, sharing more than five million photos and videos so far, Mr. Morin said. Most of their groups include far fewer than the 50 friends they are allowed, he said.

“People pull out their phone and show their photos and start telling a story about their life — ‘Last week I was on vacation,’ or ‘here’s my cat,’ or ‘here’s what I ate for dinner last night’ — but when we ask if they put those photos anywhere, people would say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s way too personal,’ ” Mr. Morin said.

Those photos might also be too boring for the full lineup of one’s Facebook friends. And, of course there are other photos that your cubicle neighbors and former flames might find to be ... too interesting.

“The larger social networks have certainly become more loose-tie networks of acquaintances,” said Mo Koyfman, an investor at Spark Capital who follows social media trends. “But the way we communicate with acquaintances is very different from how we communicate with friends.”

Spark recently invested in Kik, a mobile group messaging app.

Mr. Koyfman said most of these start-up applications centered on cellphones because they were inherently more personal than Web sites used at a computer.

Mr. Deng at Facebook said that his company was working on more tools for small-group sharing. But some Internet users and entrepreneurs maintain that the big social networks will always be too big for people to share comfortably.

John Winter, a developer in New Zealand, cobbled together Frenzy, an application that lets friends share links, photos, songs and other items in an invitation-only folder on the Web storage service Dropbox, effectively turning it into a private social feed.

“Twitter is public and Facebook is basically public,” he said. “What else are you going to use?”

    Social Networks Offer a Way to Narrow the Field of Friends R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/technology/10social.html

Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — Google plans to introduce its long-awaited service to allow people to upload and store their music collections on the Web and listen to their songs on Android phones or tablets and on computers.

The announcement of the new service, a so-called cloud-based music player, will be made on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company’s developers conference here, which will run through Wednesday.

The service, to be called Music Beta by Google, is similar to one introduced by Amazon in March, although it will store considerably more music. And like Amazon, Google does not have the cooperation of music labels, which means that users cannot do certain things that would legally require licenses, like sharing songs with friends and buying songs from Google.

But Google’s announcement at this time was unexpected because it has been negotiating with the music labels for months to try to make a deal to team with them on a cloud music service.

“A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable business,” said Jamie Rosenberg, director for digital content for Android. “So we’re not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.”

After Amazon introduced its service, music label executives said they were disappointed and exploring their legal options.

Neither Google’s nor Amazon’s cloud players make true many Web companies’ dream, which is for people to be able to listen to their music whenever they want, on any device. Ideally, Web companies would keep a copy of every song in the cloud, creating a kind of Internet jukebox, and give users instant access to those they own without uploading. But that would require licenses.

“This whole upload thing just seems like a significant barrier to wide consumer adoption, because even with broadband it just takes a long time” to upload, said David Pakman, who invests in digital media start-ups for the venture capital firm Venrock, and helped found a similar music service, Myplay, in 1999.

But Amazon forced Google’s hand, he said. “If you’re faced with another six months of brutal negotiations and your competitor just launched this, you just get in the market and get a lot of users.”

Mr. Rosenberg characterized Music Beta as a first step in a broader cloud music service and said Google hoped to continue negotiating with the record labels to get licenses to offer other things, like a music store that sells songs or a service that suggests new music to listeners.

For Google, the new service is a way to compete with the iPhone by giving Android users the ability to easily use their music collections. Android users could previously store MP3 music files on their phones but it was a cumbersome process. Amazon’s service, Cloud Player, also works on Android phones, but stores many fewer songs free.

Since songs stored by Google will stream from the Web, they are not always as accessible as songs stored on iPods, because people can’t listen to them in places without data connections, like airplanes. But Google stores copies of recently played songs and certain songs that users choose for offline access.

The music labels have long argued that they should be paid when people listen to songs on various devices. Google, Amazon and Apple, along with start-ups like Spotify and the now-defunct Imeem, have struggled to strike agreements.

Apple is still expected to be working on such a service. It acquired Lala, a cloud music service, and built a data center in North Carolina that could store users’ music collections. It also has relationships with the labels through iTunes.

Google and Amazon, meanwhile, say they do not need licenses to store music for users and play songs on multiple devices because users upload the songs they own, just as they would if they backed up their computers. “This is really a personal storage service in the same way that you would put songs on an iPad or you would put songs on a backup hard drive, so this service does not involve licenses for the music industry,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

The service is invitation-only to start. Verizon Xoom owners will receive invitations and others can sign up at music.google.com. Users download an application to their computer and upload their music, which could take many hours. The songs will be available on any device linked to the user’s Google account using a mobile app or a Web-based player, as long as they support Flash, which excludes iPhones and iPads.

Users can store 20,000 songs free, as opposed to Amazon’s service, which stores up to 1,000 songs without charge.

The service syncs activity on different devices, so if users create playlists on their phones, the playlists will automatically show up on their computers.

“We looked at the power of Google to deliver a compelling cloud-based service and essentially married those technologies with what we felt was lacking in the Android experience up until now,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

    Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music, R, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/technology/10google.html

YouTube adds Hollywood movies for rental

NEW YORK | Mon May 9, 2011
6:14pm EDT
Reuters
By Yinka Adegoke

NEW YORK (Reuters) - YouTube is adding more than 3,000 mainstream movies for users to rent starting on Monday, along with the millions of free user-created videos the popular website is best known for.

Google Inc-owned YouTube is offering a mix of recent Hollywood blockbusters, independent and foreign movies for 99 cents up to $3.99 each. These include last year's Oscar winners "The King's Speech" and "Inception" alongside classics including "Scarface" and "Taxi Driver." Most of the movies on the site are priced around $2.99.

In addition, hundreds of movies, including some offered before the latest launch, are available for free viewing as with other clips.

YouTube signed deals with major studios including Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros, Sony Corp'sJ Sony Pictures, Comcast Corp's Universal Pictures and Lions Gate Entertainment.

Once users have upgraded their YouTube accounts they can pay to watch a movie, which they have 30 days to begin viewing. Once users begin watching the movie, they typically have 24 hours to finish.

Many of the movies, which will be streamed, will be available at the same time as DVD releases.

Hollywood studios are slowly warming up to the idea of using social media not just for marketing but as a potential new distribution outlet like cable and theaters.

Warner Bros recently started experimenting with some of its popular movies on Facebook for a rental fee which could be paid with Facebook credits.

YouTube will allow users of movie rentals to share the movies on Facebook and Twitter but if the recipient clicks on the link they will see a trailer unless they have also rented the movie.

Another feature is YouTube Movie Extras, similar to DVD extras with behind-the-scenes videos, cast interviews, parodies and remixes made by YouTube users.

The new service is available only in the United States.

YouTube has spent the last couple of years redeveloping the popular site, to tweak its image as a site for grainy 2-minute clips of users' pets and kids.

The goal for YouTube is to drive more views of its videos which, in a fast-evolving Web content sector, need to offer better production values to compete against paid professional offerings from the likes of Hulu, Netflix Inc and websites CBS, Walt Disney Co's ABC and other broadcasters.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Richard Chang and Matthew Lewis)

    YouTube adds Hollywood movies for rental, R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/09/us-youtube-movies-idUSTRE7485WU20110509

Memories Lost to a Whirlwind

Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed

April 29, 2011
The New York Times
By AMY HARMON

The tornado that killed Emily Washburn’s grandfather this week also destroyed his Mississippi home, leaving his family with nothing to remember him by — until a picture of him holding the dog he loved surfaced on Facebook, posted by a woman who found it in her office parking lot, 175 miles away in Tennessee.

Like hundreds of others finding keepsakes that fell from the sky and posting photographs of them on a Facebook lost and found, the woman included her e-mail address, and Ms. Washburn wrote immediately: “That man is my granddaddy. It would mean a lot to me to have that picture.”

Created by Patty Bullion, 37, of Lester, Ala., a page on the social networking site has so far reunited dozens of storm survivors with their prized — and in some cases, only — possessions: a high school diploma that landed in a Lester front yard was traced to its owner in Tupelo, Miss., for example. A woman who lost her home in the tiny town of Phil Campbell, Ala., claimed her homemade quilt found in Athens, Ala., nearly 50 miles away: “Phil Campbell Class of 2000,” it read.

But the page is also turning social networking software designed to help friends stay in touch into an unexpected meeting ground for strangers. Along with the photographs of found items are the comments of well-wishers and homespun detectives speculating as to the identities of their owners. For those spared by the storms that killed hundreds in the South, the page is a bridge to its victims, a way to offer solace and to share in their suffering.

“Is she okay?” wrote one commenter on a snapshot of a red-haired child at a swimming pool. “I see her face throughout the day, and wonder.”

The tornado did not touch down in Lester. But when Ms. Bullion ventured into her yard on Wednesday afternoon, she found it littered with other people’s memories that the storm had disgorged in passing. One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.

Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.

“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”

The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.

By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.

One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.

Laura Mashburn saw some sign of providence in the fact that Hannah Wilson, the young woman whose photo she had found on her doorstep in Lester, turned out to work in a dentist’s office, just as she once had.

The woman’s co-workers saw the image of what looked to be her old prom picture on the page and supplied her name and address. Her mother, someone else volunteered, had a heart attack during the storm. “I saw Hannah yesterday,” wrote another friend, “and she is grateful to you for getting this back to her.”

Laura Monks, the director of a community college in Fayetteville, Tenn., who had found the picture of Ms. Washburn’s grandfather, Elvin Patterson, and his dog Yoyo, said she would return it right away.

“My great-grandfather’s name was Elvin also,” she wrote to Ms. Washburn in an e-mail. “Is there anything that I can do for your family or your community?”

Ms. Washburn, 31, whose maternal grandmother also died in the storm, said in an interview on Friday that she would frame the photograph. Then she said, her voice breaking, “I’ll probably give it to my mom.”

    Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed, R, 29.4.2011
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/us/30reunite.html

Factbox: Sony breach latest in string of cyber attacks

BOSTON | Tue Apr 26, 2011
6:34pm EDT
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - An unauthorized person stole names, addresses and possibly credit card data belonging to 77 million account holders on Sony's PlayStation Network in what could be one of the largest-ever Internet security breaches.

Internet security experts believe that these systems were breached by hackers who persuaded unsuspecting system administrators to load malicious software onto their machines. Here are some other large Internet security breaches:

April 2011 -- Online marketer Epsilon, which sends billions of emails a year for clients that represent a "Who's Who" of major banks and retailers, reports a breach of its system. It says that some clients' customer names and email addresses were stolen.

2010 -- Security researchers identify a computer worm dubbed Stuxnet that they speculate was designed to breach a system used to refine uranium in Iran at that nation's Natanz enrichment plant.

2010 -- Google Inc says that it was the victim of a cyber attack on its operations in China that resulted in the theft of its intellectual property. Google said that the networks of more than 20 other companies had been infiltrated.

2009 -- Hacker Albert Gonzalez pleads guilty to stealing tens of millions of payment card numbers by breaking into corporate computer systems from businesses including payment card processor Heartland Payment Systems, TJX Company Inc, 7-Eleven Inc and Target Co

(Reporting by Jim Finkle, editing by Bernard Orr)

    Factbox: Sony breach latest in string of cyber attacks, R, 26.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/26/us-sony-stolendata-factbox-idUSTRE73P7GF20110426

Guantanamo documents

name Pakistan ISI as al Qaeda associate

ISLAMABAD | Mon Apr 25, 2011
12:30pm EDT
By Chris Allbritton

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military classified Pakistan's top spy agency as a terrorist support entity in 2007 and used association with it as a justification to detain prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, according to leaked documents published on Sunday that are sure to further alienate Pakistan.

One document (link.reuters.com/tyn29r), given to The New York Times, say detainees who associated with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate "may have provided support to al-Qaida or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or Coalition forces."

The ISI, along with al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence, are among 32 groups on the list of "associated forces," which also includes Egypt's Islamic Jihad, headed by al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The document defines an "associate force" as "militant forces and organizations with which al-Qaida, the al-Qaida network, or the Taliban has an established working, supportive, or beneficiary relationship for the achievement of common goals."

The ISI said it had no comment.

The "JTF-GTMO Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants" likely dates from 2007 according to its classification code, and is part of a trove of 759 files on detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

The secret documents were obtained by WikiLeaks and date from between 2002 and 2009, but they were made available to The New York Times from a separate source, the paper said.

They reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a "high risk" of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision, the newspaper said.

The documents also show about a third of the 600 detainees already sent to other countries were also designated "high risk" before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments, the Times said in its report late on Sunday.

SEAT-OF-THE-PANTS INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

The dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune, the Times said.

The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantanamo that drew global condemnation, the newspaper reported.

The Times also said an Obama administration task force set up in January 2009 had reviewed the assessments and, in some cases, come to different conclusions. "Thus... the documents published by The Times may not represent the government's current views of detainees at Guantanamo."

WikiLeaks previously released classified Pentagon reports on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 250,000 State Department cables. Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old U.S. soldier accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks has been detained since May of last year.

Last week, the Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pakistani media that the ISI had a "longstanding" relationship with the Haqqani Network which is allied to al Qaeda.

"Haqqani is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners. And I have a sacred obligation to do all I can to make sure that doesn't happen," Mullen told Pakistan's daily Dawn newspaper.

"So that's at the core -- it's not the only thing -- but that's at the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship," Mullen said.

Pakistan's powerful ISI has long been suspected of maintaining ties to the Haqqani network, cultivated during the 1980s when Jalaluddin Haqqani was a feared battlefield commander against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

U.S.-Pakistan ties have been strained this year by the case of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore on January 27, as well as by tensions in Pakistan over U.S. drone strikes that have fanned anti-American sentiment.

(Editing by Andrew Marshall)

    Guantanamo documents name Pakistan ISI as al Qaeda associate, R, 25.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-pakistan-usa-guantanmo-idUSTRE73O2L920110425

A Statement by the United States Government

April 24, 2011
The New York Times

“It is unfortunate that The New York Times and other news organizations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by Wikileaks concerning the Guantanamo detention facility. These documents contain classified information about current and former GTMO detainees, and we strongly condemn the leaking of this sensitive information.

“The Wikileaks releases include Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) written by the Department of Defense between 2002 and early 2009. These DABs were written based on a range of information available then.

“The Guantanamo Review Task Force, established in January 2009, considered the DABs during its review of detainee information. In some cases, the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information. The assessments of the Guantanamo Review Task Force have not been compromised to Wikileaks. Thus, any given DAB illegally obtained and released by Wikileaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee.

“Both the previous and the current Administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo. The previous Administration transferred 537 detainees; to date, the current Administration has transferred 67. Both Administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts. That said, we will continue to work with allies and partners around the world to mitigate threats to the U.S. and other countries and to work toward the ultimate closure of the Guantanamo detention facility, consistent with good security practices and our values as a nation.”

Geoff Morrell

Pentagon Press Secretary

Ambassador Dan Fried

Special Envoy for Closure of the Guantanamo Detention Facility

    A Statement by the United States Government, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-us-government-statement.html

Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees

April 24, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE, WILLIAM GLABERSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They list the prisoners’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching guards, tearing apart shower shoes, shouting across cellblocks. And, as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration, they record years of detainees’ comments about one another.

The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.

The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.

The military analysts’ files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sometime around March 2002, he ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a “martyrdom” attack against Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But when the man, Majid Khan, got to the Pakistani mosque that he had been told Mr. Musharraf would visit, the assignment turned out to be just a test of his “willingness to die for the cause.”

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.

Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents published by The Times may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantánamo.

Among the findings in the files:

¶The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says, “Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention,” his confessions “appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.

¶Threats against captors: While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.”

¶The role of foreign officials: The leaked documents show how many foreign countries sent intelligence officers to question Guantánamo detainees — among them China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia. One such visit changed a detainee’s account: a Saudi prisoner initially told American interrogators he had traveled to Afghanistan to train at a Libyan-run terrorist training camp. But an analyst added: “Detainee changed his story to a less incriminating one after the Saudi Delegation came and spoke to the detainees.”

¶A Qaeda leader’s reputation: The file for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was charged before a military commission last week for plotting the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says he was “more senior” in Al Qaeda than Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and describes him as “so dedicated to jihad that he reportedly received injections to promote impotence and recommended the injections to others so more time could be spent on the jihad (rather than being distracted by women).”

¶The Yemenis’ hard luck: The files for dozens of the remaining prisoners portray them as low-level foot-soldiers who traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks to receive basic military training and fight in the civil war there, not as global terrorists. Otherwise identical detainees from other countries were sent home many years ago, the files show, but the Yemenis remain at Guantánamo because of concerns over the stability of their country and its ability to monitor them.

¶Dubious information: Some assessments revealed the risk of relying on information supplied by people whose motives were murky. Hajji Jalil, then a 33-year-old Afghan, was captured in July 2003, after the Afghan chief of intelligence in Helmand Province said Mr. Jalil had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed two American soldiers. But American officials, citing “fraudulent circumstances,” said later that the intelligence chief and others had participated in the ambush, and they had “targeted” Mr. Jalil “to provide cover for their own involvement.” He was sent home in March 2005.

¶A British agent: One report reveals that American officials discovered a detainee had been recruited by British and Canadian intelligence to work as an agent because of his “connections to members of various Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.” But the report suggests that he had never shifted his militant loyalties. It says that the Central Intelligence Agency, after repeated interrogations of the detainee, concluded that he had “withheld important information” from the British and Canadians, and assessed him “to be a threat” to American and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has since been sent back to his country.

¶A journalist’s interrogation: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television network’s “training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan,” including contacts with terrorist groups. While Mr. Hajj insisted he was just a journalist, his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the United Arab Emirates’ claim that he was a Qaeda member. He was released in 2008 and returned to work for Al Jazeera.

¶The first to leave: The documents offer the first public look at the military’s views of 158 detainees who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be “of little intelligence value” with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban, as was the case of a detainee who was an Afghan used car salesman. But also among those freed early was a Pakistani who would become a suicide attacker three years later.

Many of the dossiers include official close-up photographs of the detainees, providing images of hundreds of the prisoners, many of whom have not been seen publicly in years.

The files — classified “secret” and marked “noforn,” meaning they should not be shared with foreign governments — represent the fourth major collection of secret American documents that have become public over the past year; earlier releases included military incident reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and portions of an archive of some 250,000 diplomatic cables. Military prosecutors have accused an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, of leaking the materials.

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify. The documents were prepared by intelligence and military officials operating at first in the haze of war, then, as the years passed, in a prison under international criticism. In some cases, judges have rejected the government’s allegations, because confessions were made during coercive interrogation or other sources were not credible.

In 2009, a task force of officials from the government’s national security agencies re-evaluated all 240 detainees then remaining at the prison. They vetted the military’s assessments against information held by other agencies, and dropped the “high/medium/low” risk ratings in favor of a more nuanced look at how each detainee might fare if released, in light of his specific family and national environment. But those newer assessments are still secret and not available for comparison.

Moreover, the leaked archive is not complete; it contains no assessments for about 75 of the detainees.

Yet for all the limitations of the files, they still offer an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it — using constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to exert control — and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.

Scores of detainees were given disciplinary citations for “inappropriate use of bodily fluids,” as some files delicately say; other files make clear that detainees on a fairly regular basis were accused by guards of throwing urine and feces.

No new prisoners have been transferred to Guantánamo since 2007. Some Republicans are urging the Obama administration to send newly captured terrorism suspects to the prison, but so far officials have refused to increase the inmate population.

As a result, Guantánamo seems increasingly frozen in time, with detainees locked into their roles at the receding moment of their capture.

For example, an assessment of a former top Taliban official said he “appears to be resentful of being apprehended while he claimed he was working for the US and Coalition forces to find Mullah Omar,” a reference to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban chief who is in hiding.

But whatever the truth about the detainee’s role before his capture in 2002, it is receding into the past. So, presumably, is the value of whatever information he possesses. Still, his jailers have continued to press him for answers. His assessment of January 2008 — six years after he arrived in Cuba — contended that it was worthwhile to continue to interrogate him, in part because he might know about Mullah Omar’s “possible whereabouts.”

Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and William Glaberson and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.

    Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-lives-in-an-american-limbo.html

At Facebook headquarters,

Obama seeks 2008 campaign energy

PALO ALTO, Calif | Wed Apr 20, 2011
6:53pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeff Mason

PALO ALTO, Calif (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought to reignite the youthful energy that propelled his 2008 election Wednesday with a campaign-style visit to the nexus of social communications, Facebook.

Democrats acknowledge that Obama will need to rally many of the same forces that propelled him into the White House in order to win re-election in 2012: an army of young, energetic voters as well as a sizable showing from independent voters.

By visiting Facebook headquarters in California's Silicon Valley, where 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is a folk hero, Obama sought to connect to tens of millions of people who have adopted social media as a prime method of communications.

"My name is Barack Obama and I'm the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie," the president said, to laughter, at the beginning of a live-streamed town hall event with Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a tie, and Obama, dressed in a business suit, then took off their jackets before the president started fielding questions about how to reduce the budget deficit, which is projected to hit $1.4 trillion this fiscal year.

Promoting his plan of spending cuts and tax increases for the wealthiest Americans, Obama told the rich Facebook founder that both of them would have to pay more taxes to help out.

"I'm cool with that," Zuckerberg said.

Obama heads to San Francisco for Democratic fund-raising events after the Facebook session.

He then plans stops in Las Vegas and Los Angeles before returning to Washington Friday.

Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University, said having Obama on stage with Zuckerberg could help the president with young people.

"That alone is a way of trying to re-energize this young generation that might be crucial for him to be re-elected again," Krosnick said.

Obama held his deficit-cutting roadshow as policy-makers and financial markets recover from ratings agency Standard & Poor's threat to downgrade America's triple-A credit rating on worries Washington won't address its fiscal woes.

A potential Republican challenger to Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, said S&P "downgraded the Obama presidency" and that Obama should meet with S&P officials to try to gain their confidence.

 

DEEPENING ECONOMIC PESSIMISM

It is early in the 2012 election cycle, but Obama has much work ahead. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Tuesday showed Obama's approval ratings near record lows because of deepening economic pessimism among Americans.

Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said rising gasoline prices are taking their toll but they probably did not present a long-term problem for Obama, who he called the odds-on favorite.

Obama is using the first steps on the road to 2012 to promote a budget ideology that is at odds with the fiscal views of Republicans who are planning presidential campaigns.

He wants to raise taxes on wealthier Americans to fund social programs while making some budget cuts, a plan he says would bring down deficits by $4 trillion over 12 years.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan has called for slightly higher cuts, $4.4 trillion over 10 years, without raising taxes. He would make deep cuts in spending, including overhauls in the Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor that Democrats say would violate the "social compact" with Americans.

Obama said Ryan's plan was "fairly radical" and that his budget proposal was not "particularly courageous."

"Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor or people who are powerless or don't have lobbyists or don't have clout," he said to applause.

Polls suggests Americans so far are siding with Obama.

Data released from the ABC News/Washington Post poll on Wednesday said 72 percent of those surveyed favor higher taxes for wealthy Americans and 78 percent opposed to cutting health benefits for the elderly. The survey of 1,001 adults has a 3.5 percentage point error margin.

(Additional reporting by Kim Dixon, Alister Bull, Peter Henderson, Alexei Oreskovic and David Morgan; Writing by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason; Editing by Deborah Charles)

    At Facebook headquarters, Obama seeks 2008 campaign energy, R, 20.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/20/us-usa-politics-obama-idUSTRE73J0W920110420

U.S. Cracks Down on Online Gambling

April 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

In an aggressive attack on Internet gambling, federal prosecutors on Friday unsealed fraud and money laundering charges against operators of three of the most popular online poker sites. The government also seized the Internet addresses of the sites, a new enforcement tactic that effectively shuttered their doors.

Prosecutors charged that the operators of Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker tricked banks into processing billions of dollars in payments from customers in the United States. They said the actions violated a federal law passed in 2006 that prohibits illegal Internet gambling operations from accepting payments.

The sites have their headquarters in places where online gambling is legal — Antigua and the Isle of Man — a hurdle that has made it difficult for authorities in the United States to crack down on the industry. The indictment shows the intensifying game of cat-and-mouse between prosecutors and gambling sites that generate billions of dollars in transactions.

The online poker operators sought to avoid detection by banks and legal authorities by funneling payments through fictitious online businesses that purported to sell jewelry, golf balls and other items, according to the indictment. It says that when some banks processed the payments, they were unaware of the real nature of the business, but the site operators also bribed banks into accepting the payments.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that the defendants “concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits.”

Representatives for the poker sites could not immediately be reached.

On Friday, authorities arrested two defendants, including John Campos, the vice chairman of a small bank in Saint George, Utah, who they said processed gambling transactions in exchange for a $20,000 fee and a $10 million investment in the bank by poker site operators and their associates. The United States attorney’s office is working with foreign law enforcement in hopes of extraditing defendants located abroad and seizing their assets.

Experts in gambling law said that the forceful action raises tricky questions about gambling laws and the government’s reach. These experts said it was not clear, for example, whether countries that sanctioned and licensed such activity would allow extraditions.

Lawrence Walters, a lawyer who represents online gambling operations, though not those involved in these cases, said the indictment might raise an even more fundamental question: Is online poker actually illegal? Federal law prohibits sports betting, but experts are divided over whether it clearly prohibits online games like poker and blackjack.

In the indictment, prosecutors seemed to skirt the issue. They based parts of their prosecution on state laws in New York and elsewhere that prohibited unlicensed gambling, including poker. Legal experts said the prosecutors needed to rely on such prohibitions as a foundation for going after the claims of money laundering and fraud. But Mr. Walters said this strategy might face challenges. He said it was not clear that the state laws applied to foreign-based gambling operations, given that under federal law, international commerce was regulated at the federal level.

“This appears to be a precedent-setting case,” Mr. Walters said. “It will be the first time the Department of Justice takes on the looming question of whether federal law prohibits online poker.”

Opponents of online gambling have been trying to figure out for years how best to police casinos that can be located abroad but reach easily into American homes. According to statistics provided by the Poker Player’s Alliance, an advocacy organization led by former Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York, seven million Americans play online for money once a month.

In a statement, Mr. D’Amato criticized the prosecution. “We are shocked at the action,” he said, adding, “Online poker is not a crime and should not be treated as such.”

ComScore, a company that measures Internet traffic, said that in March, Full Tilt Poker had 2.6 million visitors from the United States, PokerStars had 1.9 million and Absolute Poker had 1.3 million. ComScore also reported that 1.4 million people visited Ultimate Bet, a site that the federal indictment says joined forces last year with Absolute Poker. Those were the nation’s four most popular poker sites, ComScore said.

On Friday, visitors to those sites were met with a message that begins: “This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I.” The government used the same controversial tactic of seizing domain names in actions last year against sites accused of copyright violations. Losing a domain name can be costly for a company that has invested in promoting it as the main route to its site. But the tactic can also be of only temporary effectiveness, because the company can switch to a new Web address that is outside the reach of law enforcement in the United States — one that, for example, does not end in .com.

According to the indictment, the fraud and money laundering scheme evolved from deception to bribery. Initially, after the enactment of the 2006 law aimed at limiting payment processing for online gambling, the defendants sought to dupe banks by creating fake companies, according to the indictment.

But the indictment says that as financial institutions got wise to those efforts, several defendants sough to persuade smaller banks to process the transactions by making multimillion-dollar investments in them.

    U.S. Cracks Down on Online Gambling, NYT, 15.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/technology/16poker.html

U.S. shuts down massive cyber theft ring

WASHINGTON/BOSTON | Wed Apr 13, 2011
6:55pm EDT
By Diane Bartz and Jim Finkle

WASHINGTON/BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities claimed one of their biggest victories against cyber crime as they shut down a ring they said used malicious software to take control of more than 2 million PCs around the world, and may have led to theft of more than $100 million.

A computer virus, dubbed Coreflood, infected more than 2 million PCs, enslaving them into a "botnet" that grabbed banking credentials and other sensitive data its masters used to steal funds via fraudulent banking and wire transactions, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

The government shuttered that botnet, which had operated for a decade, by seizing hard drives used to run it after a federal court in Connecticut gave the go-ahead.

"This was big money stolen on a large scale by foreign criminals. The FBI wanted to stop it and they did an incredibly good job at it," said Alan Paller, director of research at the SAN Institute, a nonprofit group that helps fight cyber crime.

The vast majority of the infected machines were in the United States, but the criminal gang was likely overseas.

"We're pretty sure a Russian crime group was behind it," said Paller.

Paller and other security experts said it was hard to know how much money the gang stole. It could easily be tens of millions of dollars and could go above $100 million, said Dave Marcus, McAfee Labs research and communications director.

A civil complaint against 13 unnamed foreign nationals was also filed by the U.S. district attorney in Connecticut. It accused them of wire and bank fraud. The Justice Department said it had an ongoing criminal investigation.

The malicious Coreflood software was used to infect computers with keylogging software that stole user names, passwords, financial data and other information, the Justice Department said.

"The seizure of the Coreflood servers and Internet domain names is expected to prevent criminals from using Coreflood or computers infected by Coreflood for their nefarious purposes," U.S. Attorney David Fein said in a statement.

In March, law enforcement raids on servers used by a Rustock botnet were shut down after legal action against them by Microsoft Corp. Authorities severed the Rustock IP addresses, effectively disabling the botnet.

Rustock had been one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail, with some tech security experts estimating they produced half the spam that fills people's junk mail bins.

A botnet is essentially one or more servers that spread malicious software and use the software to send spam or to steal personal information or data that can be used to empty a victim's bank account.

U.S. government programmers shut down the Coreflood botnet on Tuesday. They also instructed the computers enslaved in the botnet to stop sending stolen data and to shut down. A similar tactic was used in a Dutch case, but it was the first time U.S. authorities had used this method to shut down a botnet, according to court documents.

Victims of the botnet included a real estate company in Michigan that lost $115,771, a South Carolina law firm that lost $78,421 and a Tennessee defense contractor that lost $241,866, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

The government plans to work with Internet service providers around the country to identify other victims.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz and Jim Finkle; editing by Gary Hill and Andre Grenon)

    U.S. shuts down massive cyber theft ring, R, 13.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/us-cybersecurity-coreflood-idUSTRE73C7NQ20110413

Analysis: Data breach shows new "spear-phishing" risk

BOSTON/WASHINGTON | Mon Apr 4, 2011
9:43pm EDT
Reuters
By Ross Kerber and Diane Bartz

BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tens of millions of customers and employees of major banks, hotels and retailers are now at risk of "spear-phishing" attacks after hackers stole their email addresses in what may become one of the biggest data breaches ever, security experts warned.

The massive breach, involving online marketer Epsilon, a unit of Alliance Data Systems Corp, looks like it will mainly put individuals at risk if they respond to camouflaged emails seeking their credit card numbers or other information, though it could help make those emails more believable.

The breach appeared to hit about 50 companies. About two percent of the companies that pay Epsilon to email their customers had data exposed in the attack, the online marketer said in a brief online statement on Monday. A spokeswoman would not give more details, but the company said on its website it has more 2,500 customers in all.

The breach, disclosed in stages since Friday, also reminded experts of other recent incidents in which individual company employees were targeted for email scams.

On Friday, Epsilon said some clients' customer names and email addresses were obtained via an "unauthorized entry."

Companies that have said they were exposed since then include banks Citigroup Inc and Capital One Financial Corp, and retailers Walgreen Co and Best Buy Co.

More companies came forward on Monday, including Blackstone Group LP's Hilton Hotels, Marriott International Inc and Target Corp.

Compromised files apparently did not include the payment card data that has created scares in the past, such as at retailer TJX Cos.

But security experts said just having email addresses -- plus knowing where someone shops -- can help thieves write more sophisticated emails to steal financial data or spread malicious software, or malware.

That practice -- using emails that appear to come from a trustworthy source to steal data -- is sometimes known "spear-phishing" because such emails are more focused than traditional "phishing" emails.

BETTER TARGETING

One aim can be to get behind a company's firewalls without needing sophisticated software, said Anup Ghosh, chief scientist of Virginia security firm Invincea. Thieves might then aim for business plans or trade secrets.

"I think the Epsilon breach is a symptom of where we are in the security industry," he said. "If you look at the attacks over the past quarter they're all targeting the users, the employees inside the companies," he said.

Gartner Group analyst Avivah Litan said the Epsilon case showed better security rules may be needed. "The criminals are definitely trending toward targeted attacks, and they often start with targeted spear-phishing emails," she said.

Even as the Epsilon alarm sounded, details came out Friday in another spear-phishing case. This involved the RSA security unit of data-storage giant EMC Corp.

According to a company blog dated April 1, an attacker sent two different phishing emails over a two-day period "to two small groups of employees" that seemed harmless, with the subject line "2011 Recruitment Plan."

"This was intriguing enough for one of the employees to actually pull the e-mail out of their junk box and double-click on the email attachment," according to the blog.

The attachment was a spreadsheet that also contained a feature that exploited a security vulnerability to give access to the employees' PCs and elsewhere in RSA.

Other attacks against oil and energy companies have been classified as "Night Dragon" by security firm McAfee, now part of Intel Corp, and also rely on spear-phishing and other misleading methods.

Epsilon helps companies manage email marketing campaigns. It is too early to know the financial consequences of the attack for Epsilon, said David Frankland, who follows the company for Forrester Research.

But, he said, other marketers could have been hit just as easily. "This is an industry issue, everybody in this industry should recognize that they've dodged a bullet," said Frankland. He said he received emails from Disney, Best Buy and retailer Brookstone Inc notifying him his email had been obtained in the Epsilon attack.

REVIEWS UNDER WAY

Kevin Rowney, director of breach response at Symantec Corp, said it would be weeks before investigators would figure out who hacked into Epsilon's records.

"Given the phishing activity it feels like a hacker crime ring. It's not a nation state or an intelligence agency. It's clearly someone interested in profit off of this data," he said.

Joris Evers, spokesman for McAfee, said individuals as well as companies should be on the lookout for tricks. Addresses gathered from Epsilon, he said, could be a treasure trove for cyberattackers who could use the information to trick unsuspecting individuals out of more valuable information such as credit card numbers and home addresses.

 

(Additional reporting by Martinne Geller and Maria Aspan in New York)

(Editing by Ros Krasny, Steve Orlofsky and Bernard Orr)

    Analysis: Data breach shows new "spear-phishing" risk, R, 4.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/05/us-hackers-epsilon-idUSTRE7336DZ20110405

Targeted cyber attacks to rise further: Symantec

HELSINKI | Tue Apr 5, 2011
12:21am EDT
Reuters
By Tarmo Virki, European Technology Correspondent

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Targeted cyber attacks will pose a growing threat to companies around the world this year after the Stuxnet worm hit Iran's nuclear program in 2010, security software maker Symantec Corp said on Tuesday.

"Last year was the year of high-profile targeted attacks. We will see so many more," said Sian John, security strategist at Symantec.

So-called targeted attacks succeed as most consumers avoid clicking on suspicious links in spam emails, but open files that seem to arrive from legitimate senders.

"They are more challenging, but the return is higher," John said.

In total, the number of measured Web-based attacks rose 93 percent in 2010 from a year ago, boosted by proliferation of shortened Internet addresses, Symantec said in its annual threat review.

"Last year, attackers posted millions of these shortened links on social networking sites to trick victims into both phishing and malware attacks, dramatically increasing the rate of successful infection," Symantec said.

Social networking sites are increasingly important platform for attackers as their popularity among consumers is rising fast.

The software company said attacks on leading mobile platforms were also set to increase after a 42 percent rise in mobile vulnerabilities last year.

"The major mobile platforms are finally becoming ubiquitous enough to garner the attention of attackers," Symantec said. "Attackers are really following the consumers here."

(Editing by Andre Grenon)

    Targeted cyber attacks to rise further: Symantec, R, 6.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/05/us-computer-security-research-idUSTRE7340QY20110405

Google's Page presages bolder era; some uneasy

SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Apr 4, 2011
7:07pm EDT
Reuters
By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc's Larry Page is back in charge of the company he founded a decade ago and, while some investors are uneasy about his credentials, they hope he will breathe new life into the Internet search giant.

Page takes over on Monday after a decade of "adult supervision" for Google under Eric Schmidt, as the outgoing CEO called it. The switch comes as mobile gadgets redefine the way people use the Internet and Google's main ad business is under threat from rapidly growing upstarts such as Facebook and Groupon.

Page, who as a graduate student paired up with Sergey Brin to create the algorithm that launched Google's search engine to Web stardom, has yet to make his battle plan public. But industry insiders and analysts expect he will try to shore up Google's strength in search and mobile, while breaking into a hot social networking market that has eluded his company.

In the three months since the announcement that Schmidt would step down to become executive chairman, Page has wasted little time taking greater control of the company and hacking away at some of the bureaucracy, according to a Google executive who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about internal matters.

Page's first official day on the job was also marked by the resignation of Google's Senior Vice President of Product Management, Jonathan Rosenberg.

A Google spokesperson told Reuters Rosenberg had planned to leave the company in the next year or two as his children reached college age, but decided it was appropriate to do so now since he could not commit to being part of the team for any significant amount of time going forward. Rosenberg plans on writing a book and is not joining another company, the spokesperson said.

To some industry observers, the jury is still out as to whether Page can win back investors and shareholders to re-energize the company's stock and stem an exodus of talent to smaller start-ups dangling pre-IPO stock options. Google shares have slid more than 6 percent since his CEO appointment was announced in January.

Page and Brin were the top managers under Schmidt.

Ironfire Capital Managing Partner Eric Jackson says Page, whose reported disdain for marketing and public relations was detailed in the Ken Auletta book "Googled," could make investors uneasy.

"The first couple of big public events he does, whether it's an earnings call or an investment banker conference, there is going to be a huge immediate interest in how he performs and I think he's bound to disappoint," said Jackson, who does not have a position in Google.

Like Yahoo Inc founder Jerry Yang's, whose tenure there as CEO in 2007 and 2008 drew an extraordinary investor backlash, Page may not be comfortable as the face of Google, Jackson said.

"He probably underestimates the importance of that public role aspect and being a liaison with the public and shareholders," Jackson added.

BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis wrote in a note to investors on Monday that one of the key questions of the Page era is whether meeting analysts' earnings expectations will become less of a priority.

"The company may be moving back to a mindset where investments take priority over profits," wrote Gillis.

Google and Page declined to comment for this article.

PAGE'S STAMP

According to those who know Google's 38-year-old co-founder, the era of Page is not likely to be measured in half-steps.

"I always say to my team, you can never outflank Larry," Dave Girouard, head of Google's enterprise business, told Reuters shortly after the announcement of the CEO change.

"As much as you think you're going to go in and blow him away with something cool, he's going to say: 'Well, why are you just doing it for three-quarters of the world?'"

In recent months, Page's stamp has already become clear within the company.

Among the first items he has reworked are the way internal meetings are run and decisions are made, said the Google source.

"It's part of the larger thesis of let's make this plan run faster, move more quickly and take bigger bets."

The executive now expects Page to take a hard look at the many projects underway at Google, placing bigger bets on those that seem to show promise and pulling the plug on others.

With more than 24,000 employees, Google has used its vast resources to expand into various markets beyond Web search, including telephone and television products, online productivity software and even electronic books.

Google's Android software has become the No. 1 smartphone operating system after barely three years on the market, but many other projects remain works in progress.

Some, like the infamous self-driving car and a plan to join a $5 billion offshore wind grid venture, have drawn fire as extravagant excesses or pipe dreams. [ID:nN12164531]

But the company's dominance in search is inviting heightened regulatory scrutiny, which is one reason Google shares underperformed in 2010. Investors also fretted about increased competition from social networking sites and the company's decision to partially pull out of China.

While Page is widely respected for his technology prowess and vision, it remains to be seen how he will adapt to the day-to-day duties of running a giant, advertising-supported business.

"His focus tends to be on the end-user experience," said Paul Buchheit, a former Google engineer who created Gmail and is now a partner at early-stage venture capital firm Y Combinator.

Buchheit praised Page's penchant for betting on big ideas that can yield hit products, but said some parts of the business might get less attention from the new CEO.

"In terms of running the sales organization, I can imagine that that is not his priority," Buchheit added.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn; editing by Andre Grenon)

    Google's Page presages bolder era; some uneasy, R, 4.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/04/us-google-idUSTRE7334Z020110404

Google takes on Facebook with latest social tweak

SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Mar 30, 2011
4:45pm EDT
Reuters
By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc will begin allowing users to personally endorse search results and Web pages, its latest attempt to stave off rival Facebook Inc while trying to jump onboard a social networking boom.

The so-called "+1" button will start to appear alongside Google search results for select users from Wednesday, letting people recommend specific search results to friends and contacts by clicking on that button.

Eventually, the feature may begin to influence the ranking of search results, though that is only under consideration. Results are now ranked via a closely guarded algorithm.

The world's leader in Internet search is battling to maintain its share of Web surfers' time and attention, which is increasingly getting taken up by Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. But it has struggled to find its footing in the nascent market.

Its last attempt to create a social network -- Buzz -- has not fared well. A flood of complaints about how Buzz handled user privacy cast a pall over the product. On Wednesday, Google announced it had reached a settlement with regulators under which it agreed to independent privacy audits every two years.

With the new +1 buttons, Google aims to counter one of Facebook's most popular features. The new feature comes nearly a year after Facebook began offering special "Like" buttons to websites, creating a personalized recommendation system that some analysts believe could challenge the traditional ranking algorithms that search engines use to find online information.

A LOSING BATTLE?

Maintaining its role as the main gateway to information on the Internet is key for Google, which generated roughly $29 billion in revenue last year -- primarily from search ads.

While Google remains the Internet search and advertising leader, Facebook is taking a larger and larger portion of advertising dollars.

Google said that +1 recommendations will also appear in the paid ads that Google displays alongside its search results. In its internal tests, Google found that including the recommendations boosted the rates at which people click on the ads, executives told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Eventually, Google plans to let third-party websites feature +1 buttons directly on their own pages, the company said.

Google's Matt Cutts, a principal engineer for search, said the +1 buttons were part of the evolution of Google's own social search efforts, rather than a direct response to Facebook's Like buttons.

"We always keep an eye out on what other people are doing, but for me the compelling value is just that it's right there in the search results," said Cutts.

Google introduced social search in 2009, and in February the company began displaying special snippets underneath any search results that have been shared by a person's contacts on Twitter, the popular Internet microblogging service.

Currently Google is not using +1 recommendations as a factor in how it ranks search results -- a user only sees that a friend recommended a search result if the result would have turned up in a search based on Google's existing ranking criteria.

Google's Cutts said the company is evaluating whether to use +1 recommendations as a ranking factor in the future.

To use the new recommendation system, users must create a Google Profile page. Any +1 clicks that a person makes will be publicly visible to their network of contacts, which is based on existing contacts in Google products such as the company's Gmail email and its instant messaging service.

Google faced privacy criticisms last year when it launched Buzz, a social networking messaging product that automatically revealed people's personal contact lists to the public.

Cutts said that Google hoped to address any potential privacy concerns with the +1 service by making it clear that any +1 tags are public.

"As long as people have that mental model, they know what to expect, they're not surprised if they +1 something and it shows up in a different context," he said.

The feature will initially be available to a small portion of Google users in the United States on Wednesday, and the company plans to allow other U.S. users to sign up to try the +1 feature later in the day.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Gary Hill)

    Google takes on Facebook with latest social tweak, R, 30.3.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-google-idUSTRE72T5J720110330

Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84

March 27, 2011
The New York Times
By KATIE HAFNER

Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, David.

In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”

Mr. Baran’s idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another.

Mr. Baran’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.

“Paul wasn’t afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend of Mr. Baran’s. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t participate in the Arpanet project,” he said.

In 1969, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, a network that used Mr. Baran’s ideas, and those of others. The Arpanet was eventually replaced by the Internet, and packet switching still lies at the heart of the network’s internal workings.

Paul Baran was born on April 29, 1926, in Grodno, Poland. His parents moved to the United States in 1928, and Mr. Baran grew up in Philadelphia. His father was a grocer, and as a boy, Paul delivered orders to customers in a small red wagon.

He attended the Drexel Institute of Technology, which later became Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1949. He took his first job at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, testing parts of radio tubes for an early commercial computer, the Univac. In 1955, he married Evelyn Murphy, and they moved to Los Angeles, where Mr. Baran took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar data processing systems. He enrolled in night classes at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mr. Baran received a master’s degree in engineering from U.C.L.A. in 1959. Gerald Estrin, who was Mr. Baran’s adviser, said Mr. Baran was the first student he ever had who actually went to the Patent Office in Washington to investigate whether his master’s work, on character recognition, was patentable.

“From that day on, my expectations of him changed,” Dr. Estrin said. “He wasn’t just a serious student, but a young man who was looking to have an effect on the world.”

In 1959, Mr. Baran left Hughes to join RAND’s computer science department. He quickly developed an interest in the survivability of communications systems in the event of a nuclear attack, and spent the next several years at RAND working on a series of 13 papers — two of them classified — under contract to the Air Force, titled, “On Distributed Communications.”

About the same time that Mr. Baran had his idea, similar plans for creating such networks were percolating in the computing community. Donald Davies of the British National Physical Laboratory, working a continent away, had a similar idea for dividing digital messages into chunks he called packets.

“In the golden era of the early 1960s, these ideas were in the air,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at U.C.L.A. who was working on similar networking systems in the 1960s.

Mr. Baran left RAND in 1968 to co-found the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group specializing in long-range forecasting.

Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven companies, five of which eventually went public.

In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely.

“The Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001.

“The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’

“Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

Mr. Baran’s wife, Evelyn, died in 2007. In addition to his son, David, of Atherton, Calif., he is survived by three grandchildren; and his companion of recent years, Ruth Rothman.

    Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84, NYT, 27.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/technology/28baran.html

A Girl’s Nude Photo, and Altered Lives

March 26, 2011
The New York Times
By JAN HOFFMAN

LACEY, Wash. — One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend.

Both were in eighth grade.

They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite’s. Around 11 o’clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.

“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”

In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.

In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate.

Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.

But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.

Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.

“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. “It’s an electronic hickey.”

In the fall of 2009, Margarite, a petite, pretty girl with dark hair and a tiny diamond stud in her nose, was living with her father, and her life was becoming troubled. Her relationship with her father’s new wife was tense. Her grades were in a free fall.

Her social life was deteriorating. A good friendship with a girl had soured, abetted by a fight over a boy. This girl would be the one who would later brand Margarite’s photo and forward it.

Margarite’s former friend is tough and strong-willed, determined to stand out as well as fit in, according to those who know her. Her parents, recent immigrants, speak limited English and were not able to supervise her texting.

In the shifting power dynamics of middle school girls, the former friend understood well that she who sneers first sneers best. The flick of a cutting remark, swiftly followed by “Just kidding!” The eye roll. As the animosity between the two girls escalated, Margarite felt shunned by an entire group of girls and was eating lunch by herself. At home she retreated to her bedroom, alone with her cellphone and computer.

Her mother would later speculate that Margarite desperately needed to feel noticed and special. That December, just before the holidays, she took the photo of herself and sent it to Isaiah, a low-key, likable athlete she had recently gotten to know.

After the winter break, Margarite was preparing a fresh start. She would move back in with her mother and transfer to a school in a nearby district.

But one night in late January, a few days before her transfer, Margarite’s cellphone began vibrating around 1 a.m., waking her. She was being bombarded by texts — alerts from worried friends, leers from boys she scarcely knew.

The next morning in her mother’s car, Margarite lowered her head, hiding her reddened eyes, her terrible secret.

“Are you O.K.?” asked her mother, Antoinette, who like other parents and children who agreed to be interviewed asked to be identified by only first or middle names to protect their privacy.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

But her mother knew otherwise. Earlier that morning a parent had phoned Kirsten Rae, the principal of Margarite’s school, Chinook Middle, complaining about a naked photo sent to her child. The child knew at least a dozen students who had received it.

The principal then called Antoinette. The police wanted to question Margarite. On the drive to school, the girl sobbed uncontrollably, feeling betrayed and degraded.

The school was buzzing. “When I opened my phone I was scared,” recalled an eighth grader. “I knew who the girl in the picture was. It’s hard to unsee something.”

Meanwhile, another middle school principal in Lacey had begun investigating a sexting complaint that morning. Ms. Rae realized that Margarite’s photo had gone viral.

Students were summoned to Ms. Rae’s office and questioned by the police. Their cellphones were confiscated.

Ms. Rae went into crisis management. Parents were calling, wanting to know whether their children would be arrested and how she would contain the spread. She drafted a letter for school families. Administrators planned a districtwide voicemail to the families of middle school students. Chinook teachers would discuss the issue in homerooms the next day.

By late morning, Isaiah and Margarite’s former friend had been identified and pulled out of class.

Then Isaiah’s mother, Jennifer, got the call. “Naked?” she shouted. “How naked?”

When Jennifer, who works for an accountant, arrived at the school, she ran to Isaiah, a tall, slender boy with the startled air of an unfolding foal. He was weeping.

“I was in shock that I was in trouble,” he recalled during a recent interview. “I didn’t go out of my way to forward it, but I felt responsible. It was bad. Really bad.”

He told the police that the other girl had pressured him into sending her Margarite’s photo, vowing she just wanted to look at it. He said he had not known that their friendship had disintegrated.

How had the sexting from Margarite begun? “We were about to date, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, blah blah, I really like you, can you send me a picture?’ ” Isaiah recalled.

“I don’t remember if I asked her first or if she asked me. Well, I think I did send her a picture. Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Mine was, like, no shirt on.

“It is very common,” he said. “I’d seen pictures on other boys’ cellphones.”

Mr. Peters, the county prosecutor, had been hearing that sexting was becoming a problem in the community. In a recent interview, he said that if the case had just involved photos sent between Isaiah and Margarite, he would have called the parents but not pressed charges.

“The idea of forwarding that picture was bad enough,” he said. “But the text elevated it to something far more serious. It was mean-girl drama, an all-out attempt to destroy someone without thinking about the implications.”

He decided against charging Margarite. But he did charge three students with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony, because they had set off the viral outbreak.

After school had been let out that day in late January, the police read Isaiah his rights, cuffed his hands behind his back and led him and Margarite’s former friend out of the building. The eighth graders would have to spend the night in the county juvenile detention center.

The two of them and a 13-year-old girl who had helped forward the photo were arraigned before a judge the next day. (Margarite’s former friend declined to be interviewed, as did the girl who helped her.)

Officials took away Isaiah’s clothes and shoes. He changed into regulation white briefs and a blue jumpsuit. He was miserable and terrified.

“My socks got wet in the shower,” Isaiah said.

WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE?

Sexting is not illegal.

Two adults sending each other naughty pictures, dirty language? Just garden-variety First Amendment-protected speech.

A November 2009 AARP article, “Sexting Not Just For Kids,” reported approvingly on the practice for older people, too. In women’s magazines and college students’ blogs, coy guides include pragmatic tips like making sure to keep your face out of the photo.

But when that sexually explicit image includes a participant — subject, photographer, distributor or recipient — who is under 18, child pornography laws may apply.

“I didn’t know it was against the law,” Isaiah said.

That is because culturally, such a fine distinction eludes most teenagers. Their world is steeped in highly sexualized messages. Extreme pornography is easily available on the Internet. Hit songs and music videos promote stripping and sexting.

“Take a dirty picture for me,” urge the pop stars Taio Cruz and Kesha in their recent duet, “Dirty Picture.” “Send the dirty picture to me. Snap.”

In a 2010 Super Bowl advertisement for Motorola, the actress Megan Fox takes a cellphone picture of herself in a bubble bath. “I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?” she muses. The commercial continues with goggle-eyed men gaping at the forwarded photo — normalizing and encouraging such messages.

“You can’t expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,” said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology.

“They’re practicing to be a part of adult culture,” Dr. Stern said. “And in 2011, that is a culture of sexualization and of putting yourself out there to validate who you are and that you matter.”

The prevalence of under-age sexting is unclear and can often depend on the culture of a particular school or circle of students. An Internet poll conducted for The Associated Press and MTV by Knowledge Networks in September 2009 indicated that 24 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had been involved in “some type of naked sexting,” either by cellphone or on the Internet. A December 2009 telephone poll from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 5 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had sent naked or nearly naked photos or video by cellphone, and that 18 percent had received them. Boys and girls send photos in roughly the same proportion, the Pew survey found.

But a double standard holds. While a boy caught sending a picture of himself may be regarded as a fool or even a boastful stud, girls, regardless of their bravado, are castigated as sluts.

Photos of girls tend to go viral more often, because boys and girls will circulate girls’ photos in part to shame them, explained Danah Boyd, a senior social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In contrast, when a boy sends a revealing photo of himself to a girl, Dr. Boyd noted, she usually does not circulate it. And, Dr. Boyd added, boys do not tend to circulate photos of other boys: “A straight-identified boy will never admit to having naked photos of a boy on his phone.”

Policy makers are beginning to recognize that a uniform response to these cases does not fit.

“I hate the word ‘sexting,’ ” said Andrew J. Harris, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, who is leading a study of the practice among adolescents to help develop policies to address it. “We’re talking about a lot of different behaviors and a lot of different motivations.”

There is the high-tech flirt. The troubled attention-seeker. A couple’s consensual exchanges. Drunken teenagers horsing around. Pressure from a boyfriend. Malicious distribution. A teenager who barrages another with unsolicited lewd photos or texts. Or, as in a 2009 Wisconsin case of “sextortion,” a boy, pretending to be a girl online, who solicited explicit pictures of boys, which he then used as blackmail to compel those boys to have sex with him.

The content of the photos can vary widely too, from suggestive to sadistic.

Adults in positions of authority have been debating how to respond. Many school districts have banned sexting and now authorize principals to search cellphones. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 26 states have tried to pass some sort of sexting legislation since 2009.

“The majority of states are trying to put something in place to educate kids before and after the event,” said Justin T. Fitzsimmons, a senior attorney at the National District Attorneys Association who specializes in Internet crimes against children. “We have to protect kids from themselves sometimes. We’re on the cusp of teaching them how to manage their electronic reputations.”

But if the Lacey students were convicted of dissemination of child pornography, they could be sentenced to up to 36 weeks in a juvenile detention center. They would be registered as sex offenders. Because they were under 15, however, after two years they could petition a court to remove their names from the registry, if they could prove they no longer posed a threat to the public.

PENALTIES AND PREVENTION

Rick Peters, the prosecuting attorney, never intended for the Chinook Middle School students to receive draconian sentences. But he wanted to send a scared-straight message to them, as well as to the community.

Yet when the local news media storm cascaded, the outcry was not about the severe penalties for a felony sexting conviction. It was about why Mr. Peters had not also arrested Margarite.

“She’s a victim,” Mr. Peters said. “She made an ill-advised decision to share that picture with her boyfriend. As far as she knew, that was as far as it would go.

“What good would come from prosecuting her? What lesson could we teach her that she hasn’t already learned now 1,000 times over?”

Eventually a deal was brokered for the three teenagers who were charged. The offense would be amended from the child pornography felony to a gross misdemeanor of telephone harassment. Isaiah and the two girls who had initially forwarded Margarite’s photo would be eligible for a community service program that would keep them out of court, and the case could be dismissed.

Those three students would have to create public service material about the hazards of sexting, attend a session with Margarite to talk about what happened and otherwise have no contact with her.

After Margarite and her mother approved the conditions, Mr. Peters signed off, pleased.

Throughout last spring, on Monday afternoons after school, Eric Fredericks, Isaiah’s math teacher, met with the three students to help them develop their material.

Margarite’s former friend made a PowerPoint presentation, with slides copied from the Internet.

The younger girl made a poster dense with warnings about sexting’s consequences. She concluded: “I am a 13 year old teen that made a bad choice and got my life almost totaled forever. I regret what I did more than anything but I cant take it back.”

Isaiah created a two-page brochure, citing studies from the Internet, accompanied by a tumble of adolescent feeling:

“Not only does it hurt the people that are involved in the pictures you send, it can hurt your family and friends around you, the way they see you, the way you see yourself. The ways they feel about you. Them crying because of your mistakes.”

Ms. Rae has yet to distribute the material. Chinook, with 630 seventh and eighth graders, still has students who know those involved in last year’s episode. She wants to give Isaiah, Margarite and the others more time to distance themselves.

While the case was on its way to resolution, prosecutors and district educators decided to put its aftershock to good use.

“After the story broke, parents called us because they didn’t know about the law that could send kids to jail for a bad choice,” said Courtney Schrieve, a spokeswoman for the North Thurston Public Schools. “Kids didn’t know about it either. So we decided to turn this into an opportunity to educate teachers, parents and students.”

In October, Ms. Rae, the police, prosecutors and Mr. Fitzsimmons of the National District Attorneys Association held separate forums about sexting for Lacey’s teachers, parents and student delegations from the four middle schools.

The students then returned to their homerooms to teach classmates what they had learned.

Elizabeth Colón taught a session with Jon Reid. Both are eighth graders at Chinook.

“Most of the questions were about penalties,” she said. “Kids wanted to know if they would get into trouble just for receiving the picture.”

Jon spoke about long-term consequences. “I said that people may look at you differently,” he said. “They’ll know what kind of person you were, even though you changed.”

One spring evening, the three students who had been disciplined met for a mediation session with Margarite and two facilitators from Community Youth Services. The searing, painful session, which included the students’ parents and Mr. Fredericks, lasted several hours. Everyone was asked to talk about his or her role in the episode.

Mr. Fredericks listed all the people who had spent hours trying to clean the mess the students had created in a matter of seconds: police officers, lawyers, teachers, principals, hundreds of families.

Then it was Isaiah’s turn. He looked Margarite in the eye. “He poured his heart out,” Mr. Fredericks recalled. Isaiah said that he was ashamed of himself, but that most of all, he was sorry he had broken Margarite’s trust. Then he asked for her understanding and forgiveness. “He cried,” Mr. Fredericks said. “I choked up.”

The former friend who had forwarded the photo, creating the uproar, was accompanied by her mortified father, an older sister and a translator. She came across as terse and somewhat perfunctory, recalled several people who were there.

One of the last to speak was Margarite’s father, Dan, an industrial engineer.

“I could say it was everyone else’s fault,” Dan said. “But I had a piece of it, too. I learned a big lesson about my lack of involvement in her use of the phone and texting. I trusted her too much.”

He had not expected the students to be punished severely, he continued. But they needed to understand that their impulsive actions had ramifications.

“When you walk out of here tonight, it’s over, you’re done with it,” he said, looking around the room.

“Keep in mind that the only person this will have a lasting impact on,” he concluded, is his daughter.

The photo most certainly still exists on cellphones, and perhaps on social networking sites, readily retrievable.

“She will have to live with this for the rest of her life.”

THE VICTIM

When the police were finished questioning Margarite at Chinook in January 2010, her mother, a property manager, laid down the law. For the time being, no cellphone. No Internet. No TV.

Margarite, used to her father’s indulgence and unfettered access to technology, was furious.

But the punishment insulated Margarite from the wave of reaction that surged online, in local papers and television reports, and in texted comments by young teenagers throughout town. Although the police and the schools urged parents to delete the image from their children’s phones, Antoinette heard that it had spread to a distant high school within a few days.

The repercussions were inescapable. After a friend took Margarite skating to cheer her up, he was viciously attacked on his MySpace page. Kids jeered, telling him to change schools and go with “the whore.”

The school to which Margarite had transferred when she moved back in with her mother was about 15 miles away. She badly wanted to put the experience behind her. But within weeks she was recognized. A boy at the new school had the picture on his cellphone. The girls began to taunt her: Whore. Slut.

Margarite felt depressed. Often she begged to stay home from school.

In January, almost a year to the day when her photo went viral, she decided to transfer back to her old district, where she figured she at least had some friends.

The episode stays with her still. One recent evening in her mother’s condominium, Margarite chatted comfortably about her classes, a smile flashing now and then. But when the moment came to recount the events of the winter before, she slipped into her bedroom, shutting the door.

As Antoinette spoke about what had happened, the volume on the television in Margarite’s room grew louder.

Finally, she emerged. The smell of pizza for supper was irresistible.

What is it like to be at school with her former friend?

“Before I switched back, I called her,” Margarite said. “I wanted to make sure the drama was squashed between us. She said, were we even legally allowed to talk? And I said we should talk, because we’d have math together. She apologized again.”

What advice would Margarite give anyone thinking of sending such a photo?

She blushed and looked away.

“I guess if they are about to send a picture,” she replied, laughing nervously, “and they have a feeling, like, they’re not sure they should, then don’t do it at all. I mean, what are you thinking? It’s freaking stupid!”

    A Girl’s Nude Photo, and Altered Lives, G, 26.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27sexting.html

States Struggle With Minors’ Sexting

March 26, 2011
The New York Times
By JAN HOFFMAN

In the last two years, legislators have been weighing graduated responses to sexting between minors. Some legal scholars refer to the images as “self-produced child pornography.”

Some states have amended their statutes on child pornography, obscenity or Internet crimes. Many allow juvenile offenders to be charged with a misdemeanor or a lesser offense, so they can qualify for diversion programs and have their records expunged.

A few states have tried to define a sexting offense.

The laws have had a mixed response. While many experts, educators and parents applaud the lessening of sanctions for what is often seen as thoughtless adolescent risk-taking, others deplore the establishment of a new crime that could not only intrude on First Amendment rights but could also sweep more children into the court system.

As Susan Hanley Duncan notes in a recent article in the Oregon Law Review about such legislation, the states disagree philosophically about the nature of the offense, which participants should be punished and which factors may aggravate or mitigate the criminal charge.

Provisions in a new Nebraska law punish those who forward an image but not its creator. A proposed law in Ohio would charge minors who produced the image as well.

A proposal in North Dakota would increase sanctions for someone who circulated a photo with the intention to humiliate the minor. Conversely, a few states, like Texas, propose to grant immunity to minors who destroy the image or report it to the authorities within 48 hours.

Not only do states disagree about who should be prosecuted, they also differ over how to define the content to be criminalized.

Some states propose new misdemeanor crimes for minors who exchange photos that are “lewd and lascivious.” Others would create a misdemeanor for minors who send a minor’s “nude” images — a category that might not survive First Amendment challenges.

Pennsylvania is proposing relatively mild sanctions for minors who transmit images of “sexually explicit conduct,” but the depiction of activities like penetration, sadism and masturbation could bring more severe penalties.

New Jersey is considering a bill that would send first-time juvenile offenders to educational diversion programs. Other proposed bills would require schools to provide students and parents with information on sexting and require stores that sell cellphones to give customers pamphlets on it.

Some district attorneys have made such cases a priority but, using prosecutorial discretion, have designed specialized diversion programs.

Mathias H. Heck Jr., prosecuting attorney for Montgomery County, Ohio, requires teenagers charged with sexting to turn in their cellphones, perform community service and receive education about age-appropriate sexual behavior and the legal and social consequences of sexting. Since the six-month program was started about two years ago, about 60 teenagers have attended.

    States Struggle With Minors’ Sexting, R, 26.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27sextinglaw.html

What They’re Saying About Sexting

March 26, 2011
The New York Times

The New York Times interviewed teenagers individually and in two focus groups. The first, in Manhattan, was organized by the Anti-Defamation League, which offers cyberbullying prevention programs. The second, with students from Lower Merion, a Philadelphia suburb, was coordinated by Stephanie Newberg, a therapist who works with adolescents, and Paula Singer, a community organizer.

The following quotes from the sessions and interviews have been edited and condensed.

Q. Is sexting ever O.K.?

Saif, 18, Brooklyn: It’s a way to express your feelings. If a guy and a girl are in love, instead of saying it face to face, they can say it through technology.

Kathy, 17, Queens: There’s a positive side to sexting. You can’t get pregnant from it, and you can’t transmit S.T.D.’s. It’s a kind of safe sex.

Q. How common is sexting at your school?

Mei, 16, Staten Island: People call us the nerd school. My friends wouldn’t think sexting is all right. But even with the popular kids, it’s not acceptable.

Kathy: At my school, if you like a boy and you want to get his attention, you know what you have to do. When I was with my last boyfriend I refused to sext and I would go through his iPod and find pictures of girls’ breasts, and in weird ways that I never wanted to see. And they were all girls in my school.

Farrah, 17, Lower Merion: People don’t think it’s that big of a deal anymore.

Q. Do boys sext as often as girls?

Farrah: No. But the guys who get caught sexting are the cockier ones who just like to show off what they’re working with.

Q. Why do girls sext?

Zoe, 18, Lower Merion: A freshman girl doesn’t consciously want to be a slut, but she wants to be liked and she likes attention from the older boys. They’ll text to her, “Hey, hottie,” and it will progress from there.

Joe, 17, Lower Merion: I don’t think those girls are insecure. I think they’re confident, and they know they’re hot.

Rachel, 18, Philadelphia: A girl thinks, “I know I’ve been warned against it, but this is something I want to share with my boyfriend, and he’s different.”

Q. How are texts used differently from photos in sexting?

William, 18, Lower Merion: Photo sexting is done more in middle school when you just get this technology and you’re horny.

Farrah: As you get older, kids use raunchy texts more. They’re things kids wouldn’t want to say in person. But they can really send the wrong message.

William: If a girl sent me a picture of her boobs, well, obviously I’d like to show it to some friends. But I wouldn’t show them a raunchy text from her because that would be awkward. Sexually charged language is more intimate, more private.

Zoe: We see virtual images all day long, so if someone sends you an image, it loses the identity of the person. It’s just a picture.

William: And usually the face is not in it.

Q. Why do sexts go viral?

Rachel: In eighth grade, four girls were having a sleepover and they took off their clothes, covered themselves with whipped cream and sent pictures to boys of themselves licking it off. People forwarded it because it was gossip and scandalous. In middle school, that’s really appealing.

Q. How often do they go viral, really?

Nate, 16, Lower Merion: About three photos go viral each year and a third of the school sees them. The kids who receive them are in the alpha social group, and they send it to their friends. But everyone hears about them.

Q. To what extent do parents know about sexting?

Glenn, 18, Long Island: I didn’t tell my parents I was doing this focus group because they don’t know what sexting is, and it would be awkward to talk about it.

Kathy: My mom and I talk about everything.

Q. Did you know that sexting under 18 is illegal?

Saif: There’s a law? I didn’t know that. How would you catch somebody when everyone does it?

    What They’re Saying About Sexting, NYT, 26.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27sextingqanda.html

Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges

March 2, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Army announced 22 additional charges on Wednesday against Pfc. Bradley Manning, the military intelligence analyst who is accused of leaking a trove of government files to WikiLeaks a year ago.

The new charges included “aiding the enemy”; wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the Internet, knowing that it was accessible to the enemy; multiple counts of theft of public records, transmitting defense information and computer fraud. If he is convicted, Private Manning could be sentenced to life in prison.

“The new charges more accurately reflect the broad scope of the crimes that Private First Class Manning is accused of committing,” said Capt. John Haberland, an Army spokesman.

The charges provide new details about when prosecutors believe that Private Manning downloaded copies of particular files from a classified computer system in Iraq. For example, the charges say he copied a database of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables between March 28 and May 4, 2010.

The charges also accuse Private Manning of twice “adding unauthorized software” to the secret computer system — once between February and early April 2010, and again on May 4. A press release accompanying the charges said the software was used “to extract classified information” from the system.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, noted that several of the charges seemed to be describing the same basic act, but in different ways. He said that it was “typical for military prosecutors to draft charges in as many ways as possible,” and he predicted that the defense would challenge the redundancies later in the process.

“We’re potentially entering a new chapter with this set of charges,” Mr. Fidell said.

Several of the charges were predicated on the notion that various sets of files were worth more than $1,000. The charge sheet did not explain how the government had determined the value of the copied files, but it cited a federal statute that has a higher penalty when property worth at least $1,000 is involved.

The charge sheet also did not identify “the enemy” that Private Manning was accused of aiding. A military statement says that charge can be a capital offense, but the prosecution team had decided against recommending the death penalty in this case.

In its Twitter feed, WikiLeaks said the charge of aiding the enemy was “a vindictive attack on Manning for exercising his right to silence. No evidence of any such thing.” It also said the charge suggested that “WikiLeaks would be defined as ‘the enemy.’ A serious abuse.”

Military officials did not respond to a question on Wednesday about who the “enemy” was. The charge sheet, however, accuses the private of giving intelligence to the enemy “through indirect means,” which could suggest that prosecutors are referring to Afghan and Iraqi insurgents rather than to WikiLeaks.

Private Manning’s lawyer, David E. Coombs, who has largely declined to talk to the news media, said on Twitter that “aiding the enemy” was the “most significant additional charge.”

Mr. Coombs also posted on his Web site two statements in response to the new charges. One contained an excerpt from a military rule describing what can qualify for that charge. The other said “the defense has been preparing for the possibility of additional charges in this case” for several weeks. In a statement on Tuesday, he predicted that a hearing on whether to move forward with a court-martial would probably begin in May or June.

Private Manning has been held under highly restrictive conditions since July at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. One question has been why legal proceedings against him did not seem to be moving forward.

The Army said Wednesday that the delay was to evaluate Private Manning’s “mental capacity” at the defense’s request. That evaluation is pending, it said.

    Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges, NYT, 2.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/us/03manning.html

A $20 Loan, a Facebook Quarrel and a Fatal Stabbing

March 1, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and TIM STELLOH

The dispute between the two friends began over $20, money that had been given to buy baby formula and diapers, but that went for some other purpose. Days later, it became a heated public matter, splayed on the two young women’s Facebook pages.

At 5:44 p.m. on Sunday, one of them, Kamisha Richards, 22, wrote that this would be “the last time u will con me into giving u money.” Ten minutes later, the other, Kayla Henriques, 18, replied, “Dnt try to expose me mama but I’m not tha type to thug it ova facebook see u wen u get frm wrk.”

The war of words escalated over Facebook. In capital letters, at 8:52 p.m., Ms. Richards said that she would have the last laugh. Ms. Henriques replied within seconds: “We will see.”

They exchanged more messages, until about 9:30 p.m. on Sunday.

About 24 hours after their last Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards was dead, killed by a kitchen knife to the chest delivered inside an apartment in East New York, Brooklyn — according to the police, the home of Ms. Henriques, Ms. Richards and relatives of both women, including Ms. Henriques’s brother, who was dating Ms. Richards.

By about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Ms. Henriques had been arrested, after witnesses helped point investigators in her direction, and the suspect “said things to implicate herself,” according to a law enforcement official. “It was witnessed by several people, in the apartment,” the official said.

In retrospect, some of the clues were spread like electronic bread crumbs for anyone to see.

Ms. Henriques was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, said a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said the Internet postings added pieces to investigators’ knowledge, though it was not immediately clear if those clues had been gleaned before Ms. Henriques’s arrest.

“Like so many things these days, elements of this case emerged on Facebook,” Mr. Browne said.

To the victim’s relatives, it seemed unreal that the Facebook entries could foreshadow such violence. In fact, Ms. Richards did not consider the exchange she had with Ms. Henriques serious, said her sister, Schneiqua Henry, 20.

“She didn’t pay it any mind,” Ms. Henry said. “She thought it was just another argument.”

Ms. Richards’s stepfather, Dunstan Henry, 42, said she was not someone who was easily provoked to fight. “She’s the type of person that would let you run your mouth off and she wouldn’t say nothing,” said Mr. Henry, who raised Ms. Richards since she was a newborn, after her biological father returned to Kingston, Jamaica.

Ms. Richards graduated from college in May, held two jobs and hoped to enter law school. She had been dating Ramel Henriques on and off for about seven years. Ms. Henry said she lived in the same complex as Ms. Henriques, the Cypress Hills Houses, but in a different apartment.

Ms. Henry said she believed her sister had given Ms. Henriques money in the past, though she said the two had never fought over the loans.

Mr. Henry said Ms. Richards had helped care for Ms. Henriques’s 11-month-old son. “My daughter was taking care of Kayla,” he said. “She gave her $20 to be there for her like a big sister.”

Detectives are investigating whether Ms. Richards had claimed Ms. Henriques’s son as a dependent for tax purposes, and “whether that was an element in the dispute between the women,” the official said.

But that notion angered the victim’s brother, Donell Henry, 21, who said of Ms. Richards: “She didn’t use nobody as a tax write-off. When anyone needed anything in that house, she provided for them.”

What Ms. Henriques used the $20 for was not immediately clear on Tuesday. But those who knew Ms. Richards said that when it became clear that the money had not been spent on milk and diapers, she asked for it back.

In one Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards used an acronym indicating she was laughing hard, and wrote, “girl bye I guess I’ll c u later just bring the money.”

Things quickly deteriorated when the two met on Monday night in an apartment of the complex where the women were living, officials said.

An argument started in the kitchen, and Ms. Henriques, who had her son with her, passed the child to a friend who was there, Ms. Henry said.

At one point, Ms. Richards opened the refrigerator door and saw the baby formula and poured some of it out, and said it was “half of what” Ms. Henriques owed her, the official said.

The argument then continued into one of the three bedrooms in the apartment, where Ms. Richards was mortally wounded.

“The next thing you know, she stabbed my sister in the heart,” Ms. Henry said.

Ms. Richards staggered out into the hallway, and someone tried to apply pressure to her wound, as others called 911. But she was declared dead on arrival at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, officials said.

On Tuesday, Ms. Richards’ relatives were still making funeral arrangements.

The oldest of five siblings, she had graduated from John Jay College in May with a degree in criminal justice, said Yasmin Payne, 22, a longtime friend. Ms. Richards planned on attending Brooklyn Law School, and took the LSAT in December. She worked two jobs through college, friends and family members said, one as a security guard at JPMorgan Chase in Manhattan and the other as a housekeeper.

At her home in Jamaica, Queens, on Tuesday, Ms. Richards’s mother, Nicole Colter-Henry, 39, said she had raised her family in the Cypress Hills Houses but moved because she was “tired of the projects.”

“I wanted something better for them,” she said of her children as she stood surrounded by photos of her oldest daughter. “I’m never going to see my daughter. All over $20.”

No one from Ms. Henriques’s family could be reached. But later Tuesday, a message appeared on Ms. Henriques’s Facebook page, even as she was in custody.

It said: “I can’t be leave this happen I’m sorry I send my condolences to her family RiP kamisha.”

And as that message was added, many others that chronicled the women’s fight suddenly disappeared.

    A $20 Loan, a Facebook Quarrel and a Fatal Stabbing, NYT, 1.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/nyregion/02slay.html

Qaddafi YouTube Spoof by Israeli Gets Arab Fans

February 27, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — A YouTube clip mocking Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s megalomania is fast becoming a popular token of the Libya uprising across the Middle East. And in an added affront to Colonel Qaddafi, it was created by an Israeli living in Tel Aviv.

Noy Alooshe, 31, an Israeli journalist, musician and Internet buff, said he saw Colonel Qaddafi’s televised speech last Tuesday in which the Libyan leader vowed to hunt down protesters “inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway,” and immediately identified it as a “classic.”

“He was dressed strangely, and he raised his arms” like at a trance party, Mr. Alooshe said Sunday in a telephone interview, referring to the gatherings that feature electronic dance music. Then there were Colonel Qaddafi’s words with their natural beat.

Mr. Alooshe spent a few hours at the computer, using pitch corrector technology to set the speech to the music of “Hey Baby,” a song by the American rapper Pitbull, featuring another artist, T-Pain. Mr. Alooshe titled it “Zenga-Zenga,” echoing Colonel Qaddafi’s repetition of the word zanqa, Arabic for alleyway.

By the early hours of Wednesday morning, Mr. Alooshe had uploaded the electro hip-hop remix to YouTube, and he began promoting it on Twitter and Facebook, sending the link to the pages of young Arab revolutionaries. By Sunday night, the original clip had received nearly 500,000 hits and had gone viral.

Mr. Alooshe, who at first did not identify himself on the clip as an Israeli, started receiving enthusiastic messages from all around the Arab world. Web surfers soon discovered that he was a Jewish Israeli from his Facebook profile — Mr. Alooshe plays in a band called Hovevey Zion, or the Lovers of Zion — and some of the accolades turned to curses. A few also found the video distasteful.

But the reactions have largely been positive, including a message Mr. Alooshe said he received from someone he assumed to be from the Libyan opposition saying that if and when the Qaddafi regime fell, “We will dance to ‘Zenga-Zenga’ in the square.”

The original clip features mirror images of a scantily clad woman dancing along to Colonel Qaddafi’s rant. Mr. Alooshe said he got many requests from Web surfers who asked him for a version without the dancer so that they could show it to their parents, which he did.

Mr. Alooshe speaks no Arabic, though his grandparents were from Tunisia. He said he used Google Translate every few hours to check messages and remove any offensive remarks.

Israelis have been watching the events in Libya unfold with the same rapt attention as they have to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

In the past, Colonel Qaddafi has proposed that Palestinian refugees should return en masse by ship to Israel’s shores, and that Israel and the Palestinian territories should be combined into one state called Isratine.

Mr. Alooshe said he was a little worried that if the Libyan leader survived, he could send one of his sons after him. But he said it was “also very exciting to be making waves in the Arab world as an Israeli.”

As one surfer wrote in an Arabic talkback early Sunday, “What’s the problem if he’s an Israeli? The video is still funny.” He signed off with the internationally recognized “Hahaha.”

    Qaddafi YouTube Spoof by Israeli Gets Arab Fans, NYT, 27.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28youtube.html

WikiLeaks Cables Detail Qaddafi Family’s Exploits

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — After New Year’s Day 2009, Western media reported that Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, had paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing just four songs at a bash on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.

In the newspaper he controlled, Seif indignantly denied the report — the big spender, he said, was his brother, Muatassim, Libya’s national security adviser, according to an American diplomatic cable from the capital, Tripoli.

It was Muatassim, too, the cable said, who had demanded $1.2 billion in 2008 from the chairman of Libya’s national oil corporation, reportedly to establish his own militia. That would let him keep up with yet another brother, Khamis, commander of a special-forces group that “effectively serves as a regime protection unit.”

As the Qaddafi clan conducts a bloody struggle to hold onto power in Libya, cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism and bitter rivalries that have defined what a 2006 cable called “Qadhafi Incorporated,” using the State Department’s preference from the multiple spellings for Libya’s troubled first family.

The glimpses of the clan’s antics in recent years that have reached Libyans despite Col. Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.

Though the Qaddafi children are described as jockeying for position as their father ages — three sons fought to profit from a new Coca-Cola franchise — they have been well taken care of, cables say. “All of the Qaddafi children and favorites are supposed to have income streams from the National Oil Company and oil service subsidiaries,” one cable from 2006 says.

A year ago, a cable reported that proliferating scandals had sent the clan into a “tailspin” and “provided local observers with enough dirt for a Libyan soap opera.” Muatassim had repeated his St. Barts New Year’s fest, this time hiring the pop singers Beyoncé and Usher. An unnamed “local political observer” in Tripoli told American diplomats that Muatassim’s “carousing and extravagance angered some locals, who viewed his activities as impious and embarrassing to the nation.”

Another brother, Hannibal, meanwhile, had fled London after being accused of physically abusing his wife, Aline, and after the intervention of a Qaddafi daughter, Ayesha, who traveled to London despite being “many months pregnant,” the cable reported. Ayesha, along with Col. Qaddafi’s second wife, Safiya, the mother of six of his eight children, “advised Aline to report to the police that she had been hurt in an ‘accident,’ and not to mention anything about abuse,” the cable said.

Amid his siblings’ shenanigans, Seif, the president’s second-eldest son, had been “opportunely disengaged from local affairs,” spending the holidays hunting in New Zealand. His philanthropy, the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, had sent hundreds of tons of aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, and he was seen as a reasonable prospect to succeed his father.

The same 2010 cable said young Libyan contacts had reported that Seif al-Islam is the ‘hope’ of ‘Libya al-Ghad’ (Libya of tomorrow), with men in their twenties saying that they aspire to be like Seif and think he is the right person to run the country. They describe him as educated, cultured, and someone who wants a better future for Libya,” by contrast with his brothers, the cable said.

That was then. Today the young protesters on the streets are demanding the ouster of the entire family, and it was Seif el-Qaddafi who declared on television at 1 a.m. Monday that Libya faced civil war and “rivers of blood” if the people did not rally around his father.

As for the 68-year-old Colonel Qaddafi, the cables provide an arresting portrait, describing him as a hypochondriac who fears flying over water and often fasts on Mondays and Thursdays. The cables said he was an avid fan of horse racing and flamenco dancing who once added “King of Culture” to the long list of titles he had awarded himself. The memos also said he was accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde,” the senior member of his posse of Ukrainian nurses.

After Colonel Qaddafi abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, many American officials praised his cooperation. Visiting with a congressional delegation in 2009, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut told the leader and his party-loving national security adviser, Muatassim, that Libya was “an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

Before Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in 2008 — the first secretary of state to do so since 1953 — the embassy in Tripoli sought to accentuate the positive. True, Colonel Qaddafi was “notoriously mercurial” and “avoids making eye contact,” the cable warned Ms. Rice, and “there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence.” But he was “a voracious consumer of news,” the cable added, who had such distinctive ideas as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a single new state called “Isratine.”

“A self-styled intellectual and philosopher,” the cable told Ms. Rice, “he has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.”


Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    WikiLeaks Cables Detail Qaddafi Family’s Exploits, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23cables.html

Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.

That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn’t unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it.

“It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today’s world,” Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted.

His description for Jan. 28: “Egypt is now officially offline.”

In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less.

The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.

“Frankly, I didn’t participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites’ blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets,” wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.

“It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled,” he wrote. “Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, ‘this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,’ I went down and joined the protests.”

For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. “During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day,” he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. “Tell you what, I didn’t miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter. Almost everyone sharing in a political discussion, trying to announce something or circulate news, even if they are rumors, simply retweets.”

Laughing at how what is old is new again, Mr. Mohamed ended this e-mail passage with a smilely face icon.The idea that the Egyptian government could simply shut down the Internet (something Libya now does periodically) was a shock to outsiders — even a bit of a technical achievement. And the decision to do it ran against the grain of what had been the government’s relatively open policy toward the Internet, said Andrew Bossone, who spent the past five years in Cairo writing about technology.

“When I went to Tunisia about a year ago, I couldn’t get onto YouTube or Al Jazeera,” Mr. Bossone said in an interview from Beirut, where he now lives. “Egypt didn’t really block any Web sites.”

He said the policy had raised expectations: “It’s not just about Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It’s about access to this technology that everybody else has. A sense of entitlement. The idea that everybody else has it, why can’t I have it?”

Perhaps that sense of entitlement is behind the discussions that Mr. Gabr reported hearing. “Some friends are now even demanding, jokingly or seriously,” he wrote, “that a new or amended constitution should emphasize on a non-negotiable ‘right to Internet access’ for everybody.”

This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia’s annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.

Filled with much of Egypt’s technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn’t accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government.

Moushira Elamrawy, an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria, remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians’ connection to the world.

The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. “It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned — completely isolated from the world.”

Ms. Elamrawy, who is 27 and trained as an architect but consults on development for free culture projects like Wikipedia, spoke by telephone from San Francisco, where she headed after spending the protests in Alexandria.

The protesters, she recalled, realized that in the time of darkness, it was particularly important to document what happened. They knew, she said, that at some point the Internet would be back, and people would want to know about the interim.

Ahmad Balal, a radiologist at Cairo University Hospitals who was a medical student during the Wikipedia conference in 2008, was one such chronicler. Mr. Balal wrote in an e-mail that his Facebook wall was the best way to relive what he experienced during the protests.

He had joined the protests at the start, on Jan. 25, but there is an eerie gap on his Facebook wall when the Internet was down, and friends from outside Egypt asked how he was but received no reply.

On Feb. 2, 5:18 a.m., when the Internet was back, he wrote in English, one of the few times he has: “The Internet is back to Egypt. Mr. Hosni Mubarak has offered it back to us after blocking it for only 5 days. Such a generous man!!!”

Forty-two minutes later, there appeared a photograph of a crowded Tahrir Square. The caption read, “I was there.”

    Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/business/media/21link.html

Next Question for Tunisia: The Role of Islam in Politics

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER

TUNIS — The Tunisian revolution that overthrew decades of authoritarian rule has entered a delicate new phase in recent days over the role of Islam in politics. Tensions mounted here last week when military helicopters and security forces were called in to carry out an unusual mission: protecting the city’s brothels from a mob of zealots.

Police officers dispersed a group of rock-throwing protesters who streamed into a warren of alleyways lined with legally sanctioned bordellos shouting, “God is great!” and “No to brothels in a Muslim country!”

Five weeks after protesters forced out the country’s dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisians are locked in a fierce and noisy debate about how far, or even whether, Islamism should be infused into the new government.

About 98 percent of the population of 10 million is Muslim, but Tunisia’s liberal social policies and Western lifestyle shatter stereotypes of the Arab world. Abortion is legal, polygamy is banned and women commonly wear bikinis on the country’s Mediterranean beaches. Wine is openly sold in supermarkets and imbibed at bars across the country.

Women’s groups say they are concerned that in the cacophonous aftermath of the revolution, conservative forces could tug the country away from its strict tradition of secularism.

“Nothing is irreversible,” said Khadija Cherif, a former head of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, a feminist organization. “We don’t want to let down our guard.”

Ms. Cherif was one of thousands of Tunisians who marched through Tunis, the capital, on Saturday demanding the separation of mosque and state in one of the largest demonstrations since the overthrow of Mr. Ben Ali.

Protesters held up signs saying, “Politics ruins religion and religion ruins politics.”

They were also mourning the killing on Friday of a Polish priest by unknown attackers. That assault was also condemned by the country’s main Muslim political movement, Ennahdha, or Renaissance, which was banned under Mr. Ben Ali’s dictatorship but is now regrouping.

In interviews in the Tunisian news media, Ennahdha’s leaders have taken pains to praise tolerance and moderation, comparing themselves to the Islamic parties that govern Turkey and Malaysia.

“We know we have an essentially fragile economy that is very open toward the outside world, to the point of being totally dependent on it,” Hamadi Jebali, the party’s secretary general, said in an interview with the Tunisian magazine Réalités. “We have no interest whatsoever in throwing everything away today or tomorrow.”

The party, which is allied with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, says it opposes the imposition of Islamic law in Tunisia.

But some Tunisians say they remain unconvinced.

Raja Mansour, a bank employee in Tunis, said it was too early to tell how the Islamist movement would evolve.

“We don’t know if they are a real threat or not,” she said. “But the best defense is to attack.” By this she meant that secularists should assert themselves, she said.

Ennahdha is one of the few organized movements in a highly fractured political landscape. The caretaker government that has managed the country since Mr. Ben Ali was ousted is fragile and weak, with no clear leadership emerging from the revolution.

The unanimity of the protest movement against Mr. Ben Ali in January, the uprising that set off demonstrations across the Arab world, has since evolved into numerous daily protests by competing groups, a development that many Tunisians find unsettling.

“Freedom is a great, great adventure, but it’s not without risks,” said Fathi Ben Haj Yathia, an author and former political prisoner. “There are many unknowns.”

One of the largest demonstrations since Mr. Ben Ali fled took place on Sunday in Tunis, where several thousand protesters marched to the prime minister’s office to demand the caretaker government’s resignation. They accused it of having links to Mr. Ben Ali’s government.

Tunisians are debating the future of their country on the streets. Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the broad thoroughfare in central Tunis named after the country’s first president, resembles a Roman forum on weekends, packed with people of all ages excitedly discussing politics.

The freewheeling and somewhat chaotic atmosphere across the country has been accompanied by a breakdown in security that has been particularly unsettling for women. With the extensive security apparatus of the old government decimated, leaving the police force in disarray, many women now say they are afraid to walk outside alone at night.

Achouri Thouraya, a 29-year-old graphic artist, says she has mixed feelings toward the revolution.

She shared in the joy of the overthrow of what she described as Mr. Ben Ali’s kleptocratic government. But she also says she believes that the government’s crackdown on any Muslim groups it considered extremist, a draconian police program that included monitoring those who prayed regularly, helped protect the rights of women.

“We had the freedom to live our lives like women in Europe,” she said.

But now Ms. Thouraya said she was a “little scared.”

She added, “We don’t know who will be president and what attitudes he will have toward women.”

Mounir Troudi, a jazz musician, disagrees. He has no love for the former Ben Ali government, but said he believed that Tunisia would remain a land of beer and bikinis.

“This is a maritime country,” Mr. Troudi said. “We are sailors, and we’ve always been open to the outside world. I have confidence in the Tunisian people. It’s not a country of fanatics.”

    Next Question for Tunisia: The Role of Islam in Politics, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/africa/21tunisia.html

Will Egypt Be a Partner in Peace?

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL B. OREN

Washington

FOLLOWING an uprising in Cairo, Israel’s prime minister told the Knesset that he “wishes to see a free, independent and progressive Egypt,” and that “the stormy developments there may contain positive trends for progress.” The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, spoke on Aug. 18, 1952, shortly after a young and seemingly moderate officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser, came to power.

Israeli leaders subsequently tried to secure a peace treaty with Nasser, but his rule proved neither progressive nor peace-minded. Instead, his hostility toward Israel set off two wars, the second of which, the Six-Day War of 1967, continues to affect the Middle East today.

Almost 60 years later, during another Egyptian revolution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed to the Knesset that “the people of Israel are inspired by genuine calls for reform” and “support the forces that promote freedom, progress and peace.”

Indeed, Israelis watched with fascination as countless Egyptians demonstrated for change, and were inspired by their yearning for freedom. Israel has been proud to be the only Middle Eastern democracy, but we would rather be one of many. And we know that elected leaders are better than autocrats and dictators at serving their people and better at maintaining peace.

Nasser led his people to wars, but his successor, Anwar Sadat, also started a revolution — a revolution of peace. That breakthrough opened the path to the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and, later, to the Israeli-Jordanian accord, as well as negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. An entire generation of Israelis grew up never knowing war with Egypt or Jordan, and with the chance for peace with the Palestinians.

Preserving that peace is a paramount interest for the peoples of Israel, Egypt and the region. Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, Sameh Shoukry, have praised that peace as the cornerstone of Middle East stability. For us, stability is not a 20th-century relic. When we say stability, we mean security for our 7.5 million citizens. When we say stability, we mean peace.

We do not, however, view stability as a substitute for democracy. On the contrary, we believe that it is an essential component of the tolerant, open society we hope will flourish in Egypt. We have seen what democracy without tolerance and openness can yield — in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

For that reason, Israelis appreciated the Egyptian military’s statement affirming its commitment to the Camp David treaty. We were encouraged by the sight of demonstrators focused largely on reforming Egypt rather than on resuming hostilities with Israel.

But we would be irresponsible to ignore the Muslim Brotherhood, which, although a minority party in Egypt, is the best-organized and -financed opposition group. “Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny,” the Brotherhood’s supreme guide recently sermonized, pledging to raise “a jihadi generation that pursues death just as its enemies pursue life.”

And the threat to peace comes not only from religious extremists but also from some of the revolution’s secular voices. The Kafaya democratic movement, for example, once circulated a petition to nullify the peace treaty. A spokesman for the April 6 Youth Movement recently demanded the halting of Egyptian natural gas shipments to Israel, which would cut off 40 percent of our supply. And last week the reformist leader Ayman Nour declared that “the era of Camp David is over.”

The Middle East is surely in transition, but for Israel, some aspects of the region remain alarmingly unchanged. In Gaza, the Hamas regime — a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — has fired more than 200 rockets and mortar shells at Israeli towns since September. In Lebanon, where Hezbollah has imposed a puppet government, nearly 50,000 missiles are still aimed at Israel.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran hailed the Egyptian revolution as a step toward creating a Middle East “without America and the Zionist regime,” and celebrated by dispatching warships to the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, Iran continues to spin out enriched uranium — “producing it steadily, constantly,” according to Yukiya Amano, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency — to achieve nuclear military capacities.

Still, in spite of persistent dangers, Israel is striving for peace in the region. We have joined with Tony Blair, the envoy of the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers, in proposing measures to further improve the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on issues like developing new energy and water sources, expanding exports and broadening the scope of the Palestinian police.

And as we strengthen the foundations for co-existence, we urge Palestinian leaders to rejoin us at the negotiating table. We are committed to forging a durable peace based on firm security arrangements and mutual recognition between the Jewish and Palestinian nation-states.

These are indeed historic days, and Israel looks forward to transforming what has long been seen as a cold peace between governments into a deeply rooted warm peace between peoples, a peace between democracies.

Back in 1952, Ben-Gurion welcomed a new Egyptian leadership, but his dream of a harmonious Middle East was crushed. Our hope is that the current Egyptian revolution realizes Ben-Gurion’s vision, for the benefit of Egyptians and Israelis alike. If the region is indeed on the cusp of a new era, and if that awakening proves peaceful, Israel will be the first to embrace it.

Michael B. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

    Will Egypt Be a Partner in Peace?, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/opinion/20oren.html

Unrest Encircles Saudis, Stoking Sense of Unease

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — As pro-democracy uprisings spread across the Middle East, the rulers of Saudi Arabia — the region’s great bulwark of religious and political conservatism — are feeling increasingly isolated and concerned that the United States may no longer be a reliable backer, officials and diplomats say.

Saudi Arabia is far less vulnerable to democracy movements than other countries in the region, thanks to its vast oil wealth, its powerful religious establishment and the popularity of its king.

But the country’s rulers were shaken by the forced departure of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, a close and valued ally. They are anxiously monitoring the continuing protests in neighboring Bahrain and in Yemen, with which Saudi Arabia shares a porous 1,100-mile border. Those concerns come on top of long-festering worries about the situation in Iraq, where the toppling of Saddam Hussein has empowered Iran, Saudi Arabia’s great rival and nemesis.

The recent illness of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, 87, who is expected to return to the kingdom this week after an absence of more than three months for treatment in the United States and Morocco, has reinforced the sense of insecurity.

“The Saudis are completely encircled by the problem, from Jordan to Iraq to Bahrain to Yemen,” said one Arab diplomat, voicing a view that is common in the halls of power in Riyadh, the capital. “Saudi Arabia is the last heavyweight U.S. ally in the region facing Iran.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with diplomatic protocol.

The Saudis tend to see any threat to the established order in the region as a gain for their nemesis Iran, and its allies Syria and Hezbollah. They have grown increasingly worried that the Obama administration is drifting away from this perspective and supporting movements for change whose outcome cannot be guaranteed. Those worries were heightened by the crisis in Egypt, where the Saudis felt that Mr. Mubarak should have been allowed to stay on and make a more “dignified” exit, Saudi officials say.

King Abdullah had at least two phone conversations with President Obama to convey his concerns in the weeks before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, and the last conversation ended in sharp disagreement, according to officials familiar with the calls.

Saudi officials have tried to appear unruffled. On Wednesday evening, Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, the interior minister, invited a group of prominent intellectuals and journalists in Riyadh to discuss the recent turmoil. He struck a confident tone, saying that Saudi Arabia is “immune” to the protests because it is guided by religious law that its citizens will not question.

“Don’t compare us to Egypt or Tunisia,” the prince said, according to one of the attendees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was meant to be off the record. But the attendee said he and others were skeptical, and suspected the prince was merely hiding his anxieties.

The Saudi and pan-Arab news media have been cautiously supportive of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with a number of opinion articles welcoming the call for nonviolent change. That may change now that protests and violence have seized Bahrain, which lies just across a 15-mile causeway from the Saudi border. Bahrain is a far more threatening prospect, in part because of the sectarian dimensions of the protests. Bahrain’s restive population is mostly Shiite, and is adjacent to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, an important oil-producing area where the Shiite population has long complained of unfair treatment by the puritanical Saudi religious establishment. They feel a strong kinship with their co-religionists across the water.

“The Bahrain uprising may give more courage to the Shia in the Eastern Province to protest,” said one Saudi diplomat. “It might then escalate to the rest of the country.”

Most analysts say that is unlikely. Although Saudi Arabia shares many of the conditions that bred the democracy uprisings — including autocracy, corruption and a large population of educated young people without access to suitable jobs — its people are cushioned by oil wealth and culturally resistant to change.

Moreover, analysts tend to agree that Saudi Arabia would never allow the Bahraini monarchy to be overthrown. Ever since Bahrain began a harsh crackdown on protesters on Thursday, rumors have flown that Saudi Arabia provided military support or guidance; however, there is no evidence to support that. In recent days, the deputy governor of the Eastern Province, Saud bin Jalawi, spoke to Shiite religious leaders and urged them to suppress any rebellious sentiment, according to Saudi news media reports.

“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Rutgers University. “It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.”

The sectarian divisions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia could also work against unrest, allowing the authorities there to blame a sectarian agenda by Iran or its Shiite proxies for any protests. That accusation is a powerful weapon in a region where suspicion of Iran runs deep. Saudi protesters have issued a call for demonstrations in all of the country’s major cities on March 11, though many seem skeptical about the results.

“I do not expect much,” said Ali al-Ahmed, the director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, himself a Shiite who has been critical of the Saudi monarchy. “I think people still expect that the Saudi king will make things better.”

Still, the Saudis are closely watching American diplomatic gestures toward Bahrain. Any wavering of American support for Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, analysts say, would provoke a deep sense of betrayal, and could create an unprecedented rift in a partnership with the United States that has been a pillar of Saudi policy since 1945.

“Saudi Arabia has always had a fear of encirclement, whether with Communism or with Iranian influence,” said Rachel Bronson, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Bahrain to me is the tipping point for when this becomes really unsettling.”

    Unrest Encircles Saudis, Stoking Sense of Unease, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/20saudi.html

Cellphones Become the World’s Eyes and Ears on Protests

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON and BRIAN STELTER

For some of the protesters facing Bahrain’s heavily armed security forces in and around Pearl Square in Manama, the most powerful weapon against shotguns and tear gas has been the tiny camera inside their cellphones.

By uploading images of this week’s violence in Manama, the capital, to Web sites like YouTube and yFrog, and then sharing them on Facebook and Twitter, the protesters upstaged government accounts and drew worldwide attention to their demands.

A novelty less than a decade ago, the cellphone camera has become a vital tool to document the government response to the unrest that has spread through the Middle East and North Africa.

Recognizing the power of such documentation, human rights groups have published guides and provided training on how to use cellphone cameras effectively.

“You finally have a video technology that can fit into the palm of one person’s hand, and what the person can capture can end up around the world,” said James E. Katz, director of the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communication Studies. “This is the dagger at the throat of the creaky old regimes that, through the manipulation of these old centralized technologies, have been able to smother the public’s voice.”

In Tunisia, cellphones were used to capture video images of the first protests in Sidi Bouzid in December, which helped spread unrest to other parts of the country. The uploaded images also prompted producers at Al Jazeera, the satellite television network, to begin focusing on the revolt, which toppled the Tunisian government in mid-January and set the stage for the demonstrations in Egypt.

While built-in cameras have been commercially available in cellphones since the late 1990s, it was not until the tsunami that struck southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, and the London subway bombings the following July that news organizations began to take serious note of the outpouring of images and videos created and posted by nonprofessionals. Memorably, in June 2009, cellphone videos of the shooting death of a young woman in Tehran known as Nedawere uploaded on YouTube, galvanizing the Iranian opposition and rocketing around the world.

Now, news organizations regularly seek out, sift and publish such images. Authenticating them remains a challenge, since photos can be easily altered by computers and old videos can resurface again, purporting to be new. YouTube is using Storyful, a news aggregation site, to help manage the tens of thousands of videos that have been uploaded from the Middle East in recent weeks and to highlight notable ones on the CitizenTube channel.

But journalists are not the only conduits. Cellphone images are increasingly being shared between users on mobile networks and social networking sites, and they are being broadly consumed on Web sites that aggregate video and images.

The hosting Web sites have reported increases both in submissions from the Middle East and in visitors viewing the content.

Among the sites, Bambuser has stood out as a way to stream video. Mans Adler, the site’s co-founder, said it had 15,000 registered users in Egypt, most of whom signed up just before last November’s election. He said there were more than 10,000 videos on the site that were produced around the time of the election, focusing on activity at the polls, in what appeared to be an organized effort.

Afterward, the level of activity settled down to 800 to 2,000 videos a day, but then soared back to 10,000 a day again when the mass protests erupted in Egypt last month, he said.

In Bahrain, the government has blocked access to Bambuser.

At training sessions to help activists use their cameras, Bassem Samir, the executive director of the Egyptian Democratic Academy, said that improving the quality of the images and video was a high priority.

“Videos are stories,” said Mr. Samir. “What happened on the 25th and 28th of January, it’s a story. It’s like a story of people who were asking for freedom and democracy, and we had, like, five or three minutes to tell it.”

Robert Mackey contributed reporting.

    Cellphones Become the World’s Eyes and Ears on Protests, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/middleeast/19video.html

Internet Use in Bahrain Restricted, Data Shows

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

As protests have erupted in Bahrain over the last several days, the government has severely restricted the access of its citizens to the Internet, new data from an organization that monitors Internet traffic strongly suggests.

The data, collected by Arbor Networks, is the first quantitative confirmation that Internet traffic into and out of Bahrain has suffered an anomalous drop over the past days.

Jose Nazario, the senior manager of security research at Arbor, which is based in Massachusetts, said that the traffic was 10 percent to 20 percent below expected levels. The measurements gauge the amount of information flowing through Internet backbone lines into and out of Bahrain.

A fluctuation of that size is generally caused only by natural calamities or major global sporting events, Mr. Nazario said, leading the company to conclude that the most likely explanation is that Bahrain is blocking many sites on the Internet.

He said that the company could not absolutely rule out technical problems with Internet carriers inside the country as a cause.

But Jillian York of Harvard, project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative, said that the findings were consistent with reports that Bahrainis had been blocked from various sites, including YouTube and Bambuser.

    Internet Use in Bahrain Restricted, Data Shows, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18manama.html

Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America

February 17, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

COFFEEVILLE, Ala. — After a couple of days in this part of rural Alabama, it is hard to complain about a dropped iPhone call or a Cee Lo video that takes a few seconds too long to load.

The county administrator cannot get broadband at her house. Neither can the sportswriter at The Thomasville Times.

Here in Coffeeville, the only computer many students ever touch is at the high school.

“I’m missing a whole lot,” Justin Bell, 17, said. “I know that.”

As the world embraces its digital age — two billion people now use the Internet regularly — the line delineating two Americas has become more broadly drawn. There are those who have reliable, fast access to the Internet, and those, like about half of the 27,867 people here in Clarke County, who do not.

In rural America, only 60 percent of households use broadband Internet service, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. That is 10 percent less than urban households.

Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.

The report was developed in conjunction with a national broadband map that was also released Thursday. The map, considered the most comprehensive of its kind, is expected to show a number of discrepancies in the quality and availability of broadband access between rural and urban communities.

The map took five years and $200 million to develop, and is part of a billion-dollar effort to improve Internet access in the United States, particularly in rural areas.

The Obama administration has given $7.2 billion in stimulus money toward the effort, which will pay for things like wiring small communities, developing public computer centers and educating the skeptical on why they should go online in the first place.

Last week, the F.C.C. began the process of changing the $8 billion fund intended to extend telephone service to rural areas to one that extends broadband Internet to areas without it.

“This is like electricity was,” said Brian Depew, assistant executive direction for the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Lyons, Neb. “This is a critical utility.”

“You often hear people talk about broadband from a business development perspective, but it’s much more significant than that,” he added. “This is about whether rural communities are going to participate in our democratic society. If you don’t have effective broadband, you are cut out of things that are really core to who we are as a country.”

Affordable broadband service through hard wiring and or cellular phone coverage could revolutionize life in rural parts of the country, according to advocates for improving such services. In addition to being able to pay bills or purchase goods not available in nearby towns, isolated people could visit doctors online. They could work from home and take college classes.

Increasingly, interacting with certain branches of government can be done only online. And in emergencies, a lack of cellphone or e-mail can have serious consequences. Emergency alerts regarding severe weather, for example, are often sent only through text or e-mail.

All of that is important, certainly. But there is also a social component to good Internet access. Here in Clarke County, where churches and taxidermy shops line the main roads and drivers learn early to dodge logging trucks hauling pine trees, most people would simply like to upload photos of their children to Facebook.

“Ninety-five percent of the people in this county who want public water can have it, but people can’t even talk to each other around here,” said Sharon Lane, 60, who owns a small logging company with her husband and lives just outside of Coffeeville. It took her three days to try to arrange a meeting with the governor 150 miles away in Montgomery because such inquiries cannot be made over the phone and she had to drive 45 minutes to her daughter’s house to use e-mail.

At home, her cellphone works only if she walks to the porch and stands at the end of a bench. So she uses a local cellphone/walkie-talkie hybrid called Southern Link.

They have dial-up at the office, “but that’s so slow it makes you pull your hair out,” Mrs. Lane said. A satellite dish is out of the question because her house is surrounded by trees.

“It takes 10 times the effort to do what someone else can do in a matter of five minutes,” she said.

For many here, where the median household income is $27,388, the existing cellphone and Internet options are too expensive.

Joyce Graham, who oversees Web-based classes at Coffeeville High School, has struggled with dial-up service at home since 2000. A month ago, she started buying satellite service with help from stimulus money.

“For most people out here, satellite is all you can get, and it’s $70 a month,” she said. “Now who is going to pay that? This is a poor, rural county.”

Not that all of the county is without decent coverage. Some towns have broadband service, and other people can get it using wireless cellular lines.

Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, about 25 miles northeast of Coffeeville, prides himself on his city’s embrace of technology. Broadband is widely available, police cars have computers and he is planning a system that will allow water meters to be read wirelessly. But even getting e-mail on a smart phone in the middle of town can be maddening.

The digital revolution, he concedes, is coming slowly.

“There are areas within five miles of where I am sitting that don’t have any connectivity, even with cell service,” he said.

Gina Wilson, director of the Thomasville library, oversees 11 terminals with lightning-fast Internet access. They attract the usual array of children and the unemployed during the day, as well as college students who take classes online. At night, people stop by after work to check their e-mail or scroll through Facebook.

Mrs. Wilson noticed that after hours, people would pull into the parking lot, open their laptops and try to use the library’s wireless signal. So she started leaving it on all night, and soon will post a sign on the door with the password (which, if you are in Thomasville and need to get online, is “guest.”)

But even she struggles at home. She lives two miles from the city limits and only began getting broadband service through a Verizon wireless device in December.

There have been efforts to improve the county’s communication services. A group of community leaders, for example, worked for years on a plan to attach microwave technology to the numerous water towers in the area. Making wireless Internet access available throughout the county would cost about $5.5 million, they estimated. They even applied for stimulus money and made it through the first round, but were ultimately turned down.

The tiny Pine Belt Telephone Company also tried for some stimulus money, hoping to run a fiber optic line into Coffeeville. They, too, were turned down.

“Essentially it comes down to the big, national companies not wanting to invest and the lack of interest in certain areas,” said John Nettles, who runs the telecommunication company his father founded 52 years ago. “It’s not much different than the impact the big-box stores have had on rural America and small town businesses.”

A spokesman for AT&T, which offers coverage in parts but not all of Clarke Country, declined to comment.

The State of Alabama is using federal and state grants to help encourage more service in rural areas. They are working with service providers and setting up outreach teams with mobile computer labs to show people why they need the Internet. The theory is that increasing demand will make it more lucrative for companies to invest in the technology and allow them to offer online service at prices that residents can afford.

It is a hard sell, especially among older residents or people with less education. A study last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that a fifth of adults do not use the Internet because they feel it is not relevant to their lives.

“The people who could benefit from broadband the most use it the least,” said Amelia Hall Stehouwer, a researcher from Auburn University who works with rural Alabama communities.

Still, it will be a long road to the digital age here.

“We are trying to pull ourselves into the 21st century,” Mrs. Lane, the logging company owner, said. “I don’t think the rest of the world understands there is a piece of the world here that is really challenged.”

    Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America, NYT, 17.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/us/18broadband.html

Google Announces Payment System for Digital Content

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO — A day after Apple stirred up online publishers by announcing a digital subscription plan that some called too restrictive and financially burdensome, Google on Wednesday announced its own payment service for digital content that aims to be more publisher-friendly.

Google’s service, called Google One Pass, is a way for online publishers to sell digital content on the Web and through mobile apps using Google’s existing payment service, Google Checkout, and for readers to access that content on many devices with their Google e-mail address and password.

“The overall goal is to bring publishers a simple way to charge for content they choose to charge for, and for readers to have simple access without any restrictions on which devices they use,” said Jeannie Hornung, a Google spokeswoman.

Google’s service seems to directly respond to some publishers’ concerns about Apple’s plan. Apple will keep 30 percent of any sale of digital content, like books, music and magazines, within an iPhone or iPad app, and will own the subscriber information, like names and e-mail addresses. Users can choose to share that information with publishers if they want.

When publishers use One Pass, which for now is limited to online newspapers and magazines, Google will keep 10 percent of the sale price and share the customer’s name, zip code and e-mail address, unless the customer specifically asks Google not to.

“We are allowing the publishers to transact directly with their customers,” Ms. Hornung said.

Google One Pass aims to offer a broad solution for online publishers grappling with how to charge readers. It will allow publishers to avoid having to build their own payment or sign-in systems, and can identify readers logging in across various devices. In that way, it competes with services like Journalism Online’s Press+, which offers easy log-in and payments technology to online publishers.

But unlike Apple’s service, Google’s is aimed more for use on Web sites than in apps. Ms. Hornung said publishers can only use One Pass in an app if the mobile operating system’s guidelines allow it.

Publishers selling content within an app running on Google’s Android operating system, for instance, would have to comply with Android’s revenue share. However, unlike Apple, Google allows apps to redirect customers to a mobile Web browser to make a purchase, where publishers can use Google One Pass and keep 90 percent of the revenue.

Google suggested that publishers use it to experiment with different models, like subscriptions, metered access and selling single articles, and it lets publishers give free access to existing subscribers. The system is available to publishers in the United States, Canada and several European countries, and publishers including Axel Springer in Germany and Media General in the United States have signed up.

    Google Announces Payment System for Digital Content, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/media/17google.html

Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments — many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails — may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

But now, as Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence and their own knowledge of the Egyptian Internet’s construction, they are beginning to understand what, in effect, hit them. Interviews with many of those engineers, as well as an examination of data collected around the world during the blackout, indicate that the government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.

For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.

Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.

Over the past several days, activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have seen strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests there. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are particularly high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic.

A Double Knockout

The attack in Egypt relied on a double knockout, the engineers say. As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals that are tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. But the cutoff also revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on moment-to-moment information from systems that exist only outside the country — including e-mail servers at companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

The government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry somehow remained accessible.

“They drilled unexpectedly all the way down to the bottom layer of the Internet and stopped all traffic flowing,” said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a network management company based in New Hampshire that has closely monitored Internet traffic from Egypt. “With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event.”

The engineers say that a focal point of the attack was an imposing building at 26 Ramses Street in Cairo, just two and a half miles from the epicenter of the protests, Tahrir Square. At one time purely a telephone network switching center, the building now houses the crucial Internet exchange that serves as the connection point for fiber-optic links provided by five major network companies that provide the bulk of the Internet connectivity going into and out of the country.

“In Egypt the actual physical and logical connections to the rest of the world are few, and they are licensed by the government and they are tightly controlled,” said Wael Amin, president of ITWorx, a large software development company based in Cairo.

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Mr. Cowie noted that the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them — and that it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country. But he added that, inevitably, some autocrats would conclude that Mr. Mubarak had simply waited too long to bring down the curtain.

“Probably there are people who will look at this and say, it really worked pretty well, he just blew the timing,” Mr. Cowie said.

Speaking of the Egyptian shutdown and the earlier experience in Tunisia, whose censorship methods were less comprehensive, a senior State Department official said that “governments will draw different conclusions.”

“Some may take measures to tighten communications networks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Others may conclude that these things are woven so deeply into the culture and commerce of their country that they interfere at their peril. Regardless, it is certainly being widely discussed in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Vulnerable Choke Points

In Egypt, where the government still has not explained how the Internet was taken down, engineers across the country are putting together clues from their own observations to understand what happened this time, and to find out whether a future cutoff could be circumvented on a much wider scale than it was when Mr. Mubarak set his attack in motion.

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.

China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.

But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world.

But either way, the international portals were shut, and the domestic system reeled from the blow.

The Lines Go Dead

The first hints of the blackout had actually emerged the day before, Jan. 27, as opposition leaders prepared for a “Friday of anger,” with huge demonstrations expected. Ahmed ElShabrawy, who runs a company called EgyptNetwork, noticed that the government had begun blocking individual sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just after midnight on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Amin’s iPhone beeped with an alert that international connections to his consulting company’s Internet system had vanished — and then the iPhone itself stopped receiving e-mail. A few minutes later, Mr. ElShabrawy received an urgent call telling him that all Internet lines running to his company were dead.

It was not long before Ayman Bahaa, director of Egyptian Universities Network, which developed the country’s Internet nearly two decades ago, was scrambling to figure out how the system had all but collapsed between the strokes of 12 and 1.

The system had been crushed so completely that when a network engineer who does repairs in Cairo woke in the morning, he said to his family, “I feel we are in the 1800s.”

Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off.

The most telling bit of evidence was that some Internet services inside the country were still working, at least sporadically. American University in Cairo, frantically trying to relocate students and faculty members away from troubled areas, was unable to use e-mail, cellphones — which were also shut down — or even a radio frequency reserved for security teams. But the university was able to update its Web site, hosted on a server inside Egypt, and at least some people were able to pull up the site and follow the emergency instructions.

“The servers were up,” said Nagwa Nicola, the chief technology officer at American University in Cairo. “You could reach up to the Internet provider itself, but you wouldn’t get out of the country.” Ms. Nicola said that no notice had been given, and she depicted an operation that appeared to have been carried out with great secrecy.

“When we called the providers, they said, ‘Um, hang on, we just have a few problems and we’ll be on again,’ ” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us it was out.”

She added, “It wasn’t expected at all that something like that would happen.”

Told to Shut Down or Else

Individual Internet service providers were also called on the carpet and ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing agreements if the government so decrees.

According to an Egyptian engineer and an international telecom expert who both spoke on the condition of anonymity, at least one provider, Vodafone, expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told that if it did not comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt infrastructure — a method that would be much more time-consuming to reverse. Other exchanges, like an important one in Alexandria, may also have been involved.

Still, even major providers received little notice that the moves were afoot, said an Egyptian with close knowledge of the telecom industry who would speak only anonymously.

“You don’t get a couple of days with something like this,” he said. “It was less than an hour.”

After the Internet collapsed, Mr. ElShabrawy, 35, whose company provides Internet service to 2,000 subscribers and develops software for foreign and domestic customers, made urgent inquiries with the Ministry of Communications, to no avail. So he scrambled to re-establish his own communications.

When he, too, noticed that domestic fiber-optic cables were open, he had a moment of exhilaration, remembering that he could link up servers directly and establish messaging using an older system called Internet Relay Chat. But then it dawned on him that he had always assumed he could download the necessary software via the Internet and had saved no copy.

“You don’t have your tools — you don’t have anything,” Mr. ElShabrawy said he realized as he stared at the dead lines at his main office in Mansoura, about 60 miles outside Cairo.

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.

Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”

    Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html

U.S. Policy to Address Internet Freedom

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Days after Facebook and Twitter added fuel to a revolt in Egypt, the Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Internet freedom, designed to help people get around barriers in cyberspace while making it harder for autocratic governments to use the same technology to repress dissent.

The State Department’s policy, a year in the making, has been bogged down by fierce debates over which projects it should support, and even more basically, whether to view the Internet primarily as a weapon to topple repressive regimes or as a tool that autocrats can use to root out and crush dissent.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will lay out the policy in a speech on Tuesday, acknowledged the Internet’s dual role in an address a year ago, and administration officials said she would touch on that theme again, noting how social networks were used by both protesters and governments in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries.

The State Department plans to finance programs like circumvention services, which enable users to evade Internet firewalls, and training for human rights workers on how to secure their e-mail from surveillance or wipe incriminating data from cellphones if they are detained by the police.

Though the policy has been on the drawing board for months, it has new urgency in light of the turmoil in the Arab world, because it will be part of a larger debate over how the United States weighs its alliances with entrenched leaders against the young people inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Administration officials say that the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but is not a “magic bullet” that brings down repressive regimes.

“People are so enamored of the technology,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “People have a view that technology will make us free. No, people will make us free.”

Critics say the administration has dawdled for more than a year, holding back $30 million in Congressional financing that could have gone to circumvention technology, a proven method that allows Internet users to evade government firewalls by routing their traffic through proxy servers in other countries.

Some of these services have received modest financing from the government, but their backers say they need much more to install networks capable of handling millions of users in China, Iran and other countries.

A report by the Republican minority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be released Tuesday, said the State Department’s performance was so inadequate that the job of financing Internet freedom initiatives — at least those related to China — should be moved to another agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

“Certainly, the State Department took an awfully long time to get this out,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent and expert on Internet freedom issues who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “They got so besieged by the politics of what they should be funding.”

Still, Ms. MacKinnon said that she believed the State Department’s deliberations had been thoughtful and the plan “is going to be effective if it’s couched within a broader set of policies.”

There are other contradictions in the State Department’s agenda: it champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.

In the long months the government has wrestled with these issues, critics said, the Iranian government was able to keep censoring the Internet, helping it muffle the protests that followed its disputed presidential election in 2009.

Mr. Posner, a longtime human rights advocate, acknowledges that the process has been long and occasionally messy. But he contends that over the past year, the administration has developed a coherent policy that takes account of the rapidly evolving role the Internet plays in closed societies.

The State Department has received 68 proposals for nearly six times the $30 million in available funds. The department said it would take at least two months to evaluate proposals before handing out money.

Among the kinds of things that excite officials are “circuit riders,” experts who tour Internet cafes in Myanmar teaching people how to set up secure e-mail accounts, and new ways of dealing with denial-of-service attacks.

This does not satisfy critics, who say the lawmakers intended the $30 million to be used quickly — and on circumvention.

“The department’s failure to follow Congressional intent created the false impression among Iranian demonstrators that the regime had the power to disrupt access to Facebook and Twitter,” said Michael J. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who lobbies on behalf of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a circumvention service with ties to Falun Gong.

Mr. Horowitz has organized demonstrations of the service for legislators, journalists and others. On Jan. 27, the day before the Egyptian government cut off access to the Internet, he said there were more than 7.8 million page views by Egyptians on UltraSurf, one of two consumer services under the umbrella of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. That was a huge increase from only 76,000 on Jan. 22.

The trouble, Mr. Horowitz said, is that UltraSurf and its sister service, Freegate, do not have enough capacity to handle sudden spikes in usage during political crises. That causes the speed to slow to a crawl, which discourages users. The companies need tens of millions of dollars to install an adequate network, he said. Under a previous government grant, the group received $1.5 million.

But the experience in Egypt points up the limits of circumvention. By shutting down the entire Internet, the authorities were able to make such systems moot. Administration officials point out that circumvention is also of little value in countries like Russia, which does not block the Internet but dispatches the police to pursue bloggers, or in Myanmar, which has sophisticated ways to monitor e-mail accounts.

Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said that governments had been shifting from blocking the Internet to hacking and disabling it. Even in the United States, he noted, the Senate is considering a bill that would allow the president to switch off the Internet in the event of a catastrophic cyberattack.

    U.S. Policy to Address Internet Freedom, NYT, 14.2.201, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/15clinton.html

Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

With Facebook playing a starring role in the revolts that toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt, you might think the company’s top executives would use this historic moment to highlight its role as the platform for democratic change. Instead, they really do not want to talk about it.

The social media giant finds itself under countervailing pressures after the uprisings in the Middle East. While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users, according to some company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal business.

And Facebook does not want to alter its firm policy requiring users to sign up with their real identities. The company says this requirement protects its users from fraud. However, human rights advocates like Susannah Vila, the director of content and outreach for Movements.org, which provides resources for digital activists, say it could put some people at risk from governments looking to ferret out dissent.

“People are going to be using this platform for political mobilization, which only underscores the importance of ensuring their safety,” she said.

Under those rules, Facebook shut down one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest pages in November because Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who emerged as a symbol of the revolt, had used a pseudonym to create a profile as one of the administrators of the page, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

With Egypt’s emergency law in place limiting freedom of speech, Mr. Ghonim might have put himself and the other organizers at risk if they were discovered at that time. Activists scrambled to find another administrator to get the page back up and running. And when Egyptian government authorities did figure out Mr. Ghonim’s role with the Facebook page that helped promote the Jan. 25 protest in Tahrir Square, he was imprisoned for 12 days.

Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged Facebook to take “immediate and tangible steps” to help protect democracy and human rights activists who use its services, including addressing concerns about not being able to use pseudonyms.

In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Mr. Durbin said the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia had highlighted the costs and benefits of social tools to democracy and human rights advocates. “I am concerned that the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments,” he wrote.

Elliot Schrage, the vice president for global communications, public policy and marketing at Facebook, declined to discuss Facebook’s role in the recent tumult and what it might mean for the company’s services.

In a short statement, he said: “We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country. Certainly, technology was a vital tool in their efforts but we believe their bravery and determination mattered most.”

Other social media tools, like YouTube and Twitter, also played major roles in Tunisia and Egypt, especially when the protests broke out. But Facebook was the primary tool used in Egypt, first to share reports about police abuse and then to build an online community that was mobilized to join the Jan. 25 protests.

In recent weeks, Facebook pages and groups trying to mobilize protesters have sprung up in Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco and Syria. Hashtags on Twitter have also helped spread the protests, which extended to Algeria over the weekend and to Bahrain, Iran and Yemen on Monday.

“This is an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where he works on projects about the use of technology and media in the developing world. “It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists.”

Unlike Vodafone and other telecommunications carriers, which often need contracts and licenses to operate within countries, Facebook and other social networks are widely available around the world (except in countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have restricted access) and encourage the free flow of information for anyone with access to the Internet.

In a speech that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to deliver Tuesday, she will once again emphasize that Internet freedom is an inalienable right. In recent weeks, the State Department has been sending out Twitter updates in Arabic and began sending updates in Persian over the weekend.

Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have been more willing to embrace their roles in activism and unrest, Mr. Zuckerman said.

After the Internet was shut down in Egypt, Twitter and Google actively helped protesters by producing a new service, speak2tweet, that allowed people to leave voice mail messages that would be filed as updates on Twitter. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, used it as an opportunity to emphasize the positive global impact that comes with the open exchange of information.

When the Internet was back up, YouTube, working with Storyful, a social media news curation service, took the thousands of videos pouring in from the protests in Tahrir Square to help people retrieve and share the information as quickly as possible on CitizenTube, its news and politics channel.

Facebook has taken steps to help protesters in Tunisia after government officials used a virus to obtain local Facebook passwords this year. The company rerouted Facebook’s traffic from Tunisia and used the breach to upgrade security last month for all of its more than 550 million users worldwide; at the same time, it was careful to cast the response as a technical solution to a security problem. There are about two million Facebook users in Tunisia and five million in Egypt.

Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said the company was not considering changing its policy requiring users to use their real identities, which she says leads to greater accountability and a safer environment.

“The trust people place in us is the most important part of what makes Facebook work,” she said, adding that the company welcomed a discussion with Mr. Durbin and others who have an interest in this matter. “As demonstrated by our response to threats in Tunisia, we take this trust seriously and work aggressively every single day to protect people.”

Mr. Durbin has urged Facebook to join the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code of conduct for technology companies, created in 2008, that requires participating businesses to take reasonable steps to protect human rights.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, said that the people and companies behind the technology needed to be more transparent about what information they collect, and that they needed to develop consistent policies to allow people to opt in or out of their data collection systems. “We must have a right to protect the privacy of information stored in the cloud as rigorously as if it were in our own home,” he said.

    Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/business/media/15facebook.html

Israeli Archive and Google Team Up to Put Holocaust Stories at Fingertips

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By DINA KRAFT

TEL AVIV — When Google, the world’s largest search engine, joined forces with Yad Vashem, keeper of the world’s largest Holocaust archive, the first thing one Google employee here did was search for his grandfather’s name.

A link took the employee, Doron Avni, to a Google-operated page on the Yad Vashem Web site showing a photograph of his grandfather, Yecheskel Fleischer, taken in 1941 just after he was released from a Nazi-run prison in Lithuania.

Under the photograph of his grandfather, then 27, dark-eyed and gaunt, Mr. Avni was able to type in details of his grandfather’s story. Icons on the page from Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets allow for immediate sharing of the images and attached information.

“It’s a milestone that marks a new era in our ability to disseminate and bring useful accessibility to Yad Vashem’s databases,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, at a news conference last month at Google’s offices in central Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem began digitizing its holdings in the 1990s and has an extensive Web site, but the technology of Google, and the expertise of a team of employees who have been working on the project for three years, will make the information easier to find in search engines.

The photographs have been scanned using optical character recognition, which identifies any text in the pictures, making it searchable. So if Mr. Avni’s grandfather’s name had not been listed in a document but had been inscribed on a photograph, whether in Latin or Hebrew letters, he would still have been found.

The first stage of the Holocaust memorial’s partnership with Google includes about 130,000 photographs in full resolution, hosted on a Google server, with the option for users to add commentary, including historical background and personal family stories. The long-term goal is to include Yad Vashem’s larger archive of millions of documents, including survivor testimonials, diaries, letters and manuscripts.

Two years ago Google and Yad Vashem began their first joint project, a YouTube channel for viewing Holocaust survivors’ testimonials.

John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said that although such public-private partnerships could make significant contributions, the private control of a public resource raised potential conflicts.

“Down the road this altruistic project could look different,” Mr. Palfrey said by phone from Cambridge, Mass. “I would say it’s a good thing that information is made available to the world, but many of us worry about the central role a company is playing in the preservation of the world’s cultural information.”

“It is about unknowns,” he said. “We don’t know where the corporate interest might get misaligned with the public interest down the line.” For now, the interests appear to have converged.

After viewing his grandfather’s photograph, Mr. Avni, the policy manager at Google’s research and development center in Israel, added comments about how his grandfather hid in the forests of Lithuania until the end of World War II, only to be discovered by Russian soldiers who initially mistook him for a German and wanted to kill him.

When the soldiers were presented with the same photograph, clearly identifying him as a Jew because his shirt bore the Star of David that Nazis forced Jews to wear, his life was spared.

“What my grandfather wanted was for the next generation to know about the Holocaust,” Mr. Avni said. “He would have been inspired by this, to know his message is now being communicated to so many people around the world.”

    Israeli Archive and Google Team Up to Put Holocaust Stories at Fingertips, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/middleeast/13holocaust.html

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID SEGAL

PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.

But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another.

If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.

But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.

Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.

Often drastically. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”

BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”

J. C. Penney, it seems, will not suffer the same fate. But starting Wednesday, it was the subject of what Google calls “corrective action.”

Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com.

He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.

He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.

“Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”

Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger. You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.

That said, he added, “I don’t think I could do my job well if in some sense I was not offended by things that were bad for Google users.”

“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”

And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.

The next it was essentially buried.

PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.

Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position.”

She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she stated, came from partnerships with companies like Yahoo and Time Warner, from new mobile applications and from in-store kiosks.

Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.

How valuable was that? A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.

The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for “dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and the size of each sale, only Penney would know.

But in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”

There was considerable pressure from investors for Penney to deliver strong holiday results. It has been struggling through one of the more trying times of its century of retailing. The $17.8 billion in revenue it reported last year is the exact same figure it reported in 2001. It announced in January that it would close a handful of underperforming stores, as well as two of its five call centers and 19 outlets that sell excess catalog merchandise.

Adding to the company’s woes is the demise of its catalog business. Penney has phased out what it called its Big Book and poured money into its Web site. But so far, the loss of the catalog has not been offset by the expansion of the Web site. At its peak, the catalog brought in about $4 billion in revenue. In 2009, the site brought in $1.5 billion.

“For the last 35 years, Penney has tried to be accepted as a department store, and during unusually good times, it does very well,” said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Gilford Securities. “But in bad times, it gets punished by shoppers who pull back after having spent aspirationally.”

MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included cocaman.ch. (“Geekness — closer to the world” is the cryptic header atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel, a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.

The word “dresses” appears in a small collection of links in the middle of a largely blank Cocaman page. Asked about that link, Mr. Camichel said his records show that it turned up on his site last April, though he said it might have been earlier than that.

The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.

“You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money.”

Efforts to reach TNX itself last week via e-mail were not successful.

Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat. He did so on the condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a few months ago.

“It was my fault,” Mr. Stevens said. “I posted a job opening on a Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some Google employees saw it.”

In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google search.

“Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and we did not turn up. Anywhere. You’d find us if you knew our Web address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared.”

The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101 in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.

Mr. Stevens agreed to meet in mid-January for a dinner paid for by The Times. Asked to pick a “fine restaurant” in his neighborhood, he rather cheekily selected a modern French bistro in Palo Alto offering an eight-course prix fixe meal for $118. Liquid nitrogen and “fairy tale pumpkin” were two of the featured ingredients.

Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.

“The key is to roll the campaign out slowly,” he said as he nibbled at seared duck foie gras. “A lot of companies are in a rush. They want as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few hundred in a week.”

The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems, are afraid they’ll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites — the kind with low PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site’s quality. The higher the PageRank, the more “Google juice” a site offers others to which it is linked.

“The sites that TNX uses mostly have low PageRanks,” Mr. Stevens said.

Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled entirely over the Web.

Publishers can reject certain keywords and links — Mr. Stevens said some balked at a lingerie link — but for the most part the system is on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to publishers is handled via PayPal.

You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.

So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?

“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”

To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.

WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?

Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.

“Spammers never stop,” he said. Battling those spammers is a never-ending job, and one that he believes Google keeps getting better and better at.

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts said, “I’ll give a categorical denial.” He then made an impassioned case for Google’s commitment to separating the money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero influence on the latter, he said.

“If you asked me for the names of five people in advertising engineering, I don’t think I could give you the names,” he said. “There is a very long history at Google of saying ‘We are not going to worry about short-term revenue.’ ” He added: “We rely on the trust of our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users.”

He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (The tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate.)

True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In “comforter sets,” Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In “sweater dresses,” from No. 1 to No. 10.

But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.

On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4.

By Feb. 10, it was 52.

MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a company publicly, because Google’s goal is to preserve the integrity of results, not to embarrass people.

“But just because we don’t talk about it,” he said, “doesn’t mean we won’t take strong action.”

    The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

Syria Restores Access to Facebook and YouTube

February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

The Syrian government began allowing its citizens Wednesday to openly use Facebook and YouTube, three years after blocking access to Facebook and other sites as part of a crackdown on political activism. Human rights advocates greeted the news guardedly, warning that the government might have lifted the ban to more closely monitor people and activity on social networking sites.

The move comes just weeks after human rights activists in Egypt used Facebook and other social media tools to help mobilize tens of thousands of people for antigovernment protests. Activists in Tunisia used the Internet in December and January to help amass support for the protests and revolt that toppled the government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

After the mass demonstrations began in Egypt, opposition groups in Syria created a Facebook page called the Syrian Revolution and started a Twitter campaign calling on people to join “day of rage” rallies last week against President Bashar Assad. But the effort, which has generated more than 16,000 Facebook members, did not produce the street protesters that organizers had hoped for.

Despite the ban, many Syrians had been able to use Facebook and other aspects of the Web restricted by the government through proxy servers that allowed people to circumvent the Syrian government’s firewall, which also blocks Wikipedia, Amazon, Blogspot and Israeli newspapers, among other sites.

Posts on the wall on Wednesday reflected a variety of opinions, including reminders for people to be careful about what they post to bold proclamations that the page would help spur change. “We’re going to launch a fearless attack,” one user wrote on the Syrian Revolution Facebook page wall. “Link to us on all pages so that all Syrians can see this. Think. Initiate. Decide, do and have faith in God.”

Syria’s decision was welcomed by officials from the State Department with a note of caution, given the country’s restrictions on the freedom of speech and freedom to assemble.

“We welcome any positive steps taken to create a more open Internet, but absent the freedoms of expression and association, citizens should understand the risks,” said Alec J. Ross, senior adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who helped organize a delegation of business leaders from technology companies to meet with Mr. Assad in Syria last year. In those meetings, the business leaders said that opening the Web would be important to drive innovation.

Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, said she believed that the government in Syria, in releasing controls on the Internet, was trying to make it appear as if it were making democratic concessions after the tumult in Egypt and Tunisia.

“While access to social media sites presents an opportunity for Syrians to better mobilize one another, it also makes it easier for the government to identify activists and quash protests,” said Ms. Vila, of the New York City-based organization that began in 2008 with the mission to help support advocates and activists using technology. Ms. Vila said there was growing concern that the government of Sudan was closely monitoring Facebook users there after lifting restrictions.

Abdulsalam Haykal, a leading Syrian technology entrepreneur, praised the Syrian government’s decision as a reflection of a commitment to build confidence with the country’s young people. “The power of social media is an important tool for increasing participation, especially by engaging young people,” he said.

Under Facebook’s terms of service, users are required to use their real identities and not hide behind false or anonymous accounts, a violation that can lead to Facebook’s closing an account.

Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said Wednesday that the company was not considering changing or re-examining its terms of service in those countries where some users were concerned about revealing their full identity for security reasons.

“Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture,” she said. “This leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for our users. It’s a violation of our policies to use a fake name or operate under a false identity.” Ms. Frost said the company provided multiple options for users to communicate privately through groups and to read updates on a Facebook page without having to sign up for it.

Ms. Frost said that the company had always seen some traffic for Syria, but not the number of Facebook users typical in a country, like Syria, with high Internet usage. She said the company did not see significant changes in traffic Wednesday. Syrian technology companies reported that it could take hours or days for people to get full access.

A spokesperson for YouTube declined to comment on the lifting of the ban, but pointed to Google’s Transparency report, which shows a jump in traffic to YouTube.com from Syria.

According to D-Press, a pro-government Syrian Web site, there are about 200,000 Syrians currently using Facebook.

    Syria Restores Access to Facebook and YouTube, NYT, 9.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10syria.html

TV Interview of Protest Leader Revives Crowd in Cairo Square

February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, KAREEM FAHIM and ALAN COWELL

CAIRO — Several thousand demonstrators marched on the Egyptian Parliament for the first time and masses crammed into Tahrir Square on Tuesday to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in a revolt buoyed by the broadcast of an emotional television interview with a young Google executive conducted hours after his release from secret detention.

The executive, Wael Ghonim, had been a quiet force behind the YouTube and Facebook promotion of the protests, but became a symbol after he disappeared nearly two weeks ago. On Monday night, he became an instant icon when the interview was broadcast on an Egyptian satellite channel, telling his story of detention and continued hope for change that resonated deeply with the demonstrators’ demands for more fundamental shifts and their outrage over repression.

In the interview, Mr. Ghonim wept over the death toll from clashes with the government. “We were all down there for peaceful demonstrations,” he said, asking that he not be made a hero. “The heroes were the ones on the street.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Ghonim galvanized Tahrir Square, briefly joining the tens of thousands of chanting protesters there. “We will not abandon our demand, and that is the departure of the regime,” he told the crowd, which roared its agreement, The Associated Press reported.

State television responded Tuesday with an appearance by Vice President Omar Suleiman offering placating messages of respect and reform that Mr. Suleiman said came from Mr. Mubarak himself.

“The youth of Egypt deserve national appreciation,” Mr. Suleiman quoted the president as saying in a statement. “He gave orders to abstain from prosecuting them and forfeiting their rights to freedom of expression.”

Mr. Mubarak named the panel that will recommend constitutional amendments, and endorsed other moves to create a timetable for a “peaceful and organized transfer of power,” Mr. Suleiman said. Another panel will begin work to progress on other measures Mr. Suleiman announced after meeting with opposition members on Sunday.

The president “welcomed this national reconciliation,” Mr. Suleiman said, “assuring that it puts our feet at the beginning of the right path to get out of the current crisis.”

After demonstrating an ability to bring hundreds of thousands to downtown Cairo, protest organizers have sought this week to broaden their movement, acknowledging that simple numbers are not enough to force Mr. Mubarak’s departure. The government — by trying to divide the opposition, offering limited concessions and remaining patient — appears to believe it can weather the biggest challenge to its rule.

But protesters continued to demand Mr. Mubarak’s ouster and deep change. Some handed out spoof copies of the official Al Ahram newspaper with the headline: “From the people of Tahrir, Mubarak must go.” Substantial protests were seen in Alexandria, as well.

While some demonstrators had urged a general strike on Tuesday, there was little indication that the call had been heeded, or widely broadcast, in the capital, where many people live from day to day on low wages. An Egyptian state newspaper, Al Ahram, acknowledged scattered reports of walk-outs in Suez and other cities, including a sit-in by as many as 6,000 workers from the Suez Canal Authority.

Momentum has seemed to shift by the day in a climactic struggle over what kind of change Egypt will undergo and whether Egyptian officials are sincere about delivering it. In a sign of the tension, American officials described as “unacceptable” statements by Mr. Suleiman that the country was not ready for democracy, but showed no sign that they had shifted away from supporting him, a man widely viewed here as an heir to Mr. Mubarak.

Underscoring the government’s perspective that it has already offered what the protesters demanded, Naguib Sawiris, a wealthy businessman who has sought to act as a mediator, said: “Tahrir is underestimating their victory. They should declare victory.”

Normalcy had begun returning to parts of Cairo on Monday. Chronic traffic jams resumed as the city adapted to both the sprawling protests in Tahrir Square, a landmark of downtown Cairo, and the tanks, armored personnel carriers and soldiers out in the streets. People lined up at banks and returned to shops.

The government has sought to cultivate that image of the ordinary, mobilizing its newspapers and television to insist that it was re-exerting control over the capital after its police force utterly collapsed on Jan. 28. The cabinet on Monday held its first formal meeting since Mr. Mubarak reorganized it after the protests.

Officials announced that the stock market, whose index fell nearly 20 percent in two days of protests, would reopen Sunday and that six million government employees would receive a 15 percent raise, which the new finance minister, Samir Radwan, said would take effect in April.

The raise mirrored moves in Kuwait and Jordan to raise salaries or provide grants to stanch anger over rising prices across the Middle East, shaken with the repercussions of Egypt’s uprising and the earlier revolt in Tunisia. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Friday he would cut in half his salary, believed to be $350,000, amid anger there over dreary government services.

As in the past the government here has swerved between crackdown and modest moves of conciliation.

Human Rights Watch calculated that at least 297 people have died in the protests since Jan. 28, including 232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez. The majority of those deaths occurred on Jan. 28 and 29 as a result of live gunfire, the group reported, relying on hospital lists and interviews with doctors.

In one harrowing raid, the government arrested 30 human rights activists, but released them by Sunday morning. In past years the government has managed to at least make its version of events the dominant narrative, but in the outpouring of dissent here that is no longer the case. Fighting still flared in the Sinai Peninsula, where Bedouins, long treated as second-class citizens, have fought Egyptian security forces for weeks.


David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported from Cairo and Alan Cowell from Paris. Anthony Shadid, Mona el-Naggar, Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack contributed reporting in Cairo.

    TV Interview of Protest Leader Revives Crowd in Cairo Square, NYT, 8.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/world/middleeast/09egypt.html

Google Executive Who Was Jailed Said He Was Part of Facebook Campaign in Egypt

February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JENNIFER PRESTON

CAIRO — In a tearful, riveting live television interview only two hours after his release from an Egyptian prison, the Google executive Wael Ghonim acknowledged Monday that he was one of the people behind the anonymous Facebook and YouTube campaign that helped galvanize the protest that has shaken Egypt for the last two weeks.

Since he disappeared on Jan. 28, Mr. Ghonim, 30, has emerged as a symbol for the protest movement’s young, digital-savvy organizers. During the interview on a popular television show, he said he had been kidnapped and held blindfolded by Egyptian authorities.

Afterward, hundreds of Egyptians took to Twitter and the Internet, calling on him to become one of their new leaders.

“Please do not make me a hero,” Mr. Ghonim said in a voice trembling with emotion, and later completely breaking down when told of the hundreds of people who have died in clashes since the Jan. 25 protests began. “I want to express my condolences for all the Egyptians who died.”

“We were all down there for peaceful demonstrations,” he added. “The heroes were the ones on the street.”

Mr. Ghonim rejected the government’s assertions that the protests had been instigated by foreigners or the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Islamist opposition group. “There was no Muslim Brotherhood presence in organizing these protests,” he said. “It was all spontaneous, voluntary. Even when the Muslim Brotherhood decided to take part it was their choice to do so. This belongs to the Egyptian youth.”

The release of Mr. Ghonim, who oversees marketing efforts for Google in the Middle East and North Africa, comes as the government is trying to portray Egypt as returning to business as usual. But in the interview, Mr. Ghonim described the experience of what he called his extralegal “kidnapping” and imprisonment to rally the public to continue their protests. “It is a crime,” he said, “This is what we are fighting.”

Ending the mystery over who helped begin the social media campaign that inspired the protests, Mr. Ghonim said that he was a creator of the We are All Khaled Said Facebook page. That page and multiple videos uploaded on YouTube about Mr. Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian man beaten to death by the police in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, helped to connect human rights organizers with average Egyptians and to raise awareness about police abuse and torture.

Mr. Ghonim, an Egyptian who lives in Dubai with his wife and two children, was not well known outside of technology and business circles in Egypt. But his disappearance, followed by his interview Monday night on the same program where the Nobel laureate and diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei plunged into Egyptian politics a year ago, appeared to have quickly turned him into a national celebrity.

Mr. Ghonim, who came across as both humble and fearless, said he was grabbed by security police officers while getting into a taxi and then taken to a location where he was detained for 12 days, blindfolded the entire time. He said that he was deeply worried that his family did not know where he was. He said he was not physically harmed.

The first word of his release came when he posted this sentence in English on his Twitter account at 7:05 p.m.:

“Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it.”

Google then confirmed the news. “It is a huge relief that Wael Ghonim has been released,” the company said in a message posted on Twitter and then released in an e-mail. “We send our best wishes to him and his family.”

Since last June, the Khaled Said Facebook page has attracted more than 473,000 members and has become a tool not only for organizing the protests but also for providing regular updates about other cases of police abuse. But the page’s creator remained a mystery.

“We did not know who he was,” said Aida Seif el-Dawla, a human rights advocate and professor of psychiatry who works with El Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture in Cairo. The center became involved in Mr. Said’s case last June after police officials presented autopsy reports saying that he died of asphyxiation from swallowing drugs rather than the brutal beating witnessed by several people.

She said many young people identified with Mr. Said and were outraged by his death and how the police had handled it. She said that there were many Facebook pages, but that it was the page that Mr. Ghonim started that gained momentum.

“It was the most popular,” she said. “It gave a space for the young people to interact with each other and to plan together.”

The Facebook page published cellphone photographs from the morgue showing the horrific injuries Mr. Said had suffered, YouTube videos contrasting his smiling face with the morgue photos and witness accounts that disputed the initial Egyptian police version of his death. The information helped lead to prosecutors arresting two police officers in connection with Mr. Said’s death. It also prompted Facebook members to attend both street and silent protests several times since last June.

In addition to his work at Google, Mr. Ghonim had served as a technology consultant for Mr. ElBaradei’s pro-democracy campaign.

Before his family lost contact with him, Mr. Ghonim had posted an ominous message on Twitter that troubled friends and family, raising concerns about his whereabouts: “Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.”

While friends and family searched hospitals in the area for him, several human rights activists became convinced that he was being held by the authorities for his role in the social media efforts and for inspiring some of the young protest organizers to use those media to help promote the protests.

Last Friday, members of the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page, a group of young advocates who began using Facebook in early 2008 to raise awareness about labor strikes and human rights abuses, announced that they had designated Mr. Ghonim their spokesman.

Habib Haddad, a Boston-based businessman and a friend of Mr. Ghonim’s, said he spoke to Mr. Ghonim’s wife after her husband’s release on Monday. “Not sure I ever heard someone that happy and emotional,” Mr. Haddad posted on his Twitter account.

Mr. Ghonim was among many in Egypt who have disappeared during the revolt.

“At this point, Wael has become a symbolic figure,” said Mr. Haddad. “Moving forward, it is going to be his personal decision if he were to embrace this symbolic figure or not. As a friend, I care mostly about his personal safety and his family’s safety.”


David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Jennifer Preston from New York. Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Christine Hauser from New York.

    Google Executive Who Was Jailed Said He Was Part of Facebook Campaign in Egypt, NYT, 7.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/world/middleeast/08google.html

China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Amman, Jordan

Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.

But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long — oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change — have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.

Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.

This is why every government out here is now rushing to increase subsidies and boost wages — even without knowing how to pay for it, or worse, taking it from capital budgets to build schools and infrastructure. King Abdullah II of Jordan just gave every soldier and civil servant a $30-a-month pay raise, along with new food and gasoline subsidies. Kuwait’s government last week announced a “gift” of about $3,500 to each of Kuwait’s 1.1 million citizens and about $850 million in food subsidies.

But China is a challenge for Egypt and Jordan in other ways. Several years ago, I wrote about Egyptian entrepreneurs who were importing traditional lanterns for Ramadan — with microchips in them that played Egyptian folk songs — from China. When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.

Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.” They have college degrees on paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to better teach fractions to third graders. That has not been Hosni Mubarak’s obsession.

I look at the young protesters who gathered in downtown Amman today, and the thousands who gathered in Egypt and Tunis, and my heart aches for them. So much human potential, but they have no idea how far behind they are — or maybe they do and that’s why they’re revolting. Egypt’s government has wasted the last 30 years — i.e., their whole lives — plying them with the soft bigotry of low expectations: “Be patient. Egypt moves at its own pace, like the Nile.” Well, great. Singapore also moves at its own pace, like the Internet.

The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.

I have not been to Jordan for a while, but my ears are ringing today with complaints about corruption, frustration with the king and queen, and disgust at the enormous gaps between rich and poor. King Abdullah, who sacked his cabinet last week and promised real reform and real political parties, has his work cut out for him. And given some of the blogs that my friends here have shared with me from the biggest local Web site, Ammonnews.net, the people are not going to settle for the same-old, same-old. They say so directly now, dropping the old pretense of signing antigovernment blog posts as “Mohammed living in Sweden.”

Jordan is not going to blow up — today. The country is balanced between East Bank Bedouin tribes and West Bank Palestinians, who fought a civil war in 1970. “There is no way that the East Bankers would join with the Palestinians to topple the Hashemite monarchy,” a retired Jordanian general remarked to me. But this balance also makes reform difficult. The East Bankers overwhelmingly staff the army and government jobs. They prefer the welfare state, and hate both “privatization” and what they call “the digitals,” the young Jordanian techies pushing for reform. The Palestinians dominate commerce but also greatly value the stability the Hashemite monarchy provides.

Egypt was definitely a wake-up call for Jordan’s monarchy. The king’s challenge going forward is to convince his people that “their voices are going to be louder in the voting booth than in the street,” said Salah Eddin al-Bashir, a member of Jordan’s Senate.

As for Cairo, I think the real story in Egypt today is the 1952 revolution, led from the top by the military, versus the 2011 revolution, led from below by the people. The Egyptian Army has become a huge patronage system, with business interests and vast perks for its leaders. For Egypt to have a happy ending, the army has to give up some of its power and set up a fair political transition process that gives the Egyptian center the space to build precisely what Mubarak refused to permit — legitimate, independent, modernizing, secular parties — that can compete in free elections against the Muslim Brotherhood, now the only authentic party.

If that happens, I am not the least bit worried about the Muslim Brotherhoods in Jordan or Egypt hijacking the future. Actually, they should be worried. The Brotherhoods have had it easy in a way. They had no legitimate secular political opponents. The regimes prevented that so they could tell the world it is either “us or the Islamists.” As a result, I think, the Islamists have gotten intellectually lazy. All they had to say was “Islam is the answer” or “Hosni Mubarak is a Zionist” and they could win 20 percent of the vote. Now, if Egypt and Jordan can build a new politics, the Muslim Brotherhood will, for the first time, have real competition from the moderate center in both countries — and they know it.

“If leaders don’t think in new ways, there are vacancies for them in museums,” said Zaki Bani Rsheid, political director of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm. When I asked Rsheid if his own party was up for this competition, he stopped speaking in Arabic and said to me in English, with a little twinkle in his eye: “Yes we can.”

I hope so, and I also hope that events in Egypt and Jordan finally create a chance for legitimate modern Arab democratic parties to test him.

    China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06friedman.html

Hackers Gained Access to Nasdaq Systems, but Not Trades

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Computer hackers have repeatedly breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, according to several law enforcement officials.

An investigation into the breach is being carried out jointly by officials in New York for the F.B.I. and Department of Justice, with assistance from computer crimes specialists, according to two law enforcement officials. One government official said the federal investigation has been going on for at least a couple of months.

The officials had knowledge of the case but were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Nasdaq is one of the country’s largest stock exchanges, and where many of the nation’s most important companies list their stocks for trading. It is a crucial part of the country’s economic infrastructure, and any attempt to disrupt the workings of the exchange could have severe repercussions across the economy.

But market experts said there was an important distinction between the computer systems of the outside shell company, Nasdaq OMX, which owns both the United States exchange and other exchanges in Europe, and the inner stand-alone computer network that runs the trading of shares.

The government official said that the investigation is limited to Nasdaq’s network and was not aware of any other stock exchanges being targeted.

Investigators are trying to work out who is behind the breaches and what their aim was — whether, for example, it was to cause disruption or profit commercially.

News of the breach was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for Nasdaq could not provide immediate comment on the investigation.

Up until a few decades ago, trading in the United States was dominated by the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, but trading has fragmented in recent years across a number of new electronic exchanges. Nasdaq pioneered electronic trading and has grown rapidly to rival the New York Stock Exchange.

Focusing at least initially on technology stocks, the Nasdaq includes Microsoft and Google among the companies that list their shares on its exchange. There is fierce competition between Nasdaq and the N.Y.S.E. for business. The N.Y.S.E. has also adopted more and more electronic trading. In the past five years or so, other electronic exchanges such as Direct Edge and BATS Exchange have grown up, intent on prying trading away from the two bigger markets.

It was unclear whether the investigation had also contacted other exchanges about possible breaches of their computer security.

In a statement, the New York Stock Exchange said: “We take any potential threat seriously and we continue working at the highest levels of security and integrity.” The exchange would not say whether there had been any attempts to breach its systems or whether it had been contacted by Federal investigators.

A spokesman for BATS Exchange said it had never had any issue of this kind.

A spokesman for Direct Edge, Rafi Reguer, said it was continually monitoring its systems but was not aware of any serious attempt to penetrate its computers.


Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

    Hackers Gained Access to Nasdaq Systems, but Not Trades, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06nasdaq.html

Spotlight Again Falls on Web Tools and Change

January 29, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Fear is the dictator’s traditional tool for keeping the people in check. But by cutting off Egypt’s Internet and wireless service late last week in the face of huge street protests, President Hosni Mubarak betrayed his own fear — that Facebook, Twitter, laptops and smartphones could empower his opponents, expose his weakness to the world and topple his regime.

There was reason for Mr. Mubarak to be shaken. By many accounts, the new arsenal of social networking helped accelerate Tunisia’s revolution, driving the country’s ruler of 23 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, into ignominious exile and igniting a conflagration that has spread across the Arab world at breathtaking speed. It was an apt symbol that a dissident blogger with thousands of followers on Twitter, Slim Amamou, was catapulted in a matter of days from the interrogation chambers of Mr. Ben Ali’s regime to a new government post as minister for youth and sports. It was a marker of the uncertainty in Tunis that he had stepped down from the government by Thursday.

Tunisia’s uprising offers the latest encouragement for a comforting notion: that the same Web tools that so many Americans use to keep up with college pals and post passing thoughts have a more noble role as well, as a scourge of despotism. It was just 18 months ago, after all, that the same technologies were hailed as a factor in Iran’s Green Revolution, the stirring street protests that followed the disputed presidential election.

But since that revolt collapsed, Iran has become a cautionary tale. The Iranian police eagerly followed the electronic trails left by activists, which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown that followed. The government even crowd-sourced its hunt for enemies, posting on the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to identify them.

“The Iranian government has become much more adept at using the Internet to go after activists,” said Faraz Sanei, who tracks Iran at Human Rights Watch. The Revolutionary Guard, the powerful political and economic force that protects the ayatollahs’ regime, has created an online surveillance center and is believed to be behind a “cyberarmy” of hackers that it can unleash against opponents, he said.

Repressive regimes around the world may have fallen behind their opponents in recent years in exploiting new technologies — not unexpected when aging autocrats face younger, more tech-savvy opponents. But in Minsk and Moscow, Tehran and Beijing, governments have begun to climb the steep learning curve and turn the new Internet tools to their own, antidemocratic purposes.

The countertrend has sparked a debate over whether the conventional wisdom that the Internet and social networking inherently tip the balance of power in favor of democracy is mistaken. A new book, “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” by a young Belarus-born American scholar, Evgeny Morozov, has made the case most provocatively, describing instance after instance of strongmen finding ways to use new media to their advantage.

After all, the very factors that have brought Facebook and similar sites such commercial success have huge appeal for a secret police force. A dissident’s social networking and Twitter feed is a handy guide to his political views, his career, his personal habits and his network of like-thinking allies, friends and family. A cybersurfing policeman can compile a dossier on a regime opponent without the trouble of the street surveillance and telephone tapping required in a pre-Net world.

If Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt has resorted to the traditional blunt instrument against dissent in a crisis — cutting off communications altogether — other countries have shown greater sophistication. In Belarus, officers of the K.G.B. — the secret police agency has preserved its Soviet-era name — now routinely quote activists’ comments on Facebook and other sites during interrogations, said Alexander Lukashuk, director of the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Last month, he said, investigators appearing at the apartment of a Belarusian photojournalist mocked her by declaring that since she had written online that they usually conducted their searches at night, they had decided to come in the morning.

In Syria, “Facebook is a great database for the government now,” said Ahed al-Hindi, a Syrian activist who was arrested at an Internet cafe in Damascus in 2006 and left his country after being released from jail. Mr. Hindi, now with the United States-based group CyberDissidents.org, said he believes that Facebook is doing more good than harm, helping activists form virtual organizations that could never survive if they met face to face. But users must be aware that they are speaking to their oppressors as well as their friends, he said.

Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International, said the popular networking services, like most technologies, are politically neutral.

“There’s nothing deterministic about these tools — Gutenberg’s press, or fax machines or Facebook,” Ms. Brown said. “They can be used to promote human rights or to undermine human rights.”

This is the point of Mr. Morozov, 26, a visiting scholar at Stanford. In “The Net Delusion,” he presents an answer to the “cyberutopians” who assume that the Internet inevitably fuels democracy. He coined the term “spinternet” to capture the spin applied to the Web by governments that are beginning to master it.

In China, Mr. Morozov said, thousands of commentators are trained and paid — hence their nickname, the 50-Cent Party — to post pro-government comments on the Web and steer online opinion away from criticism of the Communist Party. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez, after first denouncing hostile Twitter comments as “terrorism,” created his own Twitter feed — an entertaining mix of politics and self-promotion that now has 1.2 million followers.

In Russia, Mr. Morozov noted, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has managed to co-opt several prominent new-media entrepreneurs, including Konstantin Rykov, whose many Web sites now skew strongly pro-Putin and whose anti-Georgia documentary about the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 went viral on the Web.

Mr. Morozov acknowledges that social networking “definitely helps protesters to mobilize.”

“But is it making protest more likely? I don’t think so.”

In Egypt, it appears, at least some activists share Mr. Morozov’s wariness about the double-edged nature of new media. An anonymous 26-page leaflet that appeared in Cairo with practical advice for demonstrators last week, The Guardian reported, instructed activists to pass it on by e-mail and photocopy — but not by Facebook and Twitter, because they were being monitored by the government.

Then Mr. Mubarak’s government, evidently concluding that it was too late for mere monitoring, unplugged his country from the Internet altogether. It was a desperate move from an autocrat who had not learned to harness the tools his opponents have embraced.


Scott Shane, a reporter in The Times’s Washington bureau, is the author of “Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union.”

    Spotlight Again Falls on Web Tools and Change, NYT, 29.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30shane.html

Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service

January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

Egypt has cut off nearly all Internet traffic into and out of the country in the largest blackout of its kind, according to firms that monitor international data flows.

Cellphone networks were also disrupted. Vodafone said in a statement on its Web site that “all mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas.” The company said it was “obliged to comply” with the order.

Egypt has been trying to contain growing protests that have been fueled in part by videos and other information shared over social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Renesys, a Vermont-based company that tracks Internet traffic, said that just after midnight Cairo time, or 5 p.m. New York time, Egyptian authorities had succeeded in shutting down the country’s international access points.

“Almost nobody in Egypt has Internet connectivity, and there are no workarounds,” said Jim Cowie, the company’s chief technology officer. “I’ve never seen it happen at this scale.”

“In a fundamental sense, it’s as if you rewrote the map and they are no longer a country,” said Mr. Cowie. “I never thought it would happen to a country the size and scale of Egypt.”

In most countries, the points of access to the global Internet infrastructure are many and distributed. But Mr. Cowie said that Egypt was relatively late in widely adopting the Internet, so it has fewer access points. The government can shut these down with “six, or even four phone calls,” he said.

A Facebook spokesman, Andrew Noyes, said the company had seen a drop in traffic from Egypt since Thursday. “Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community,” he said in a statement.

In an interview, Mr. Noyes said the company was still seeing some traffic coming in from Egypt, but that it was “minimal.”

An executive at Google, the owner of YouTube, which activists have used to disseminate videos of the protests, spoke out against the shutdown.

David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, said Internet access was “a fundamental right, and it’s very sad if it’s denied to citizens of Egypt or any country.”

    Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service, NYT, 28.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html

From Bullets to Megabytes

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. FALKENRATH

STUXNET, the computer worm that last year disrupted many of the gas centrifuges central to Iran’s nuclear program, is a powerful weapon in the new age of global information warfare. A sophisticated half-megabyte of computer code apparently accomplished what a half-decade of United Nations Security Council resolutions could not.

This new form of warfare has several implications that are only now becoming apparent, and that will define the shape of what will likely become the next global arms race — albeit one measured in computer code rather than firepower.

For one thing, the Stuxnet attack highlights the ambiguous boundaries of sovereignty in cyberspace. Promoting national security in the information age will, from time to time, cause unpredictable offense to the rights and interests of innocent people, companies and countries.

Stuxnet attacked the Iranian nuclear program, but it did so by maliciously manipulating commercial software products sold globally by major Western companies. Whoever launched the assault also infected thousands of computers in several countries, including Australia, Britain, Indonesia and the United States.

This kind of collateral damage to the global civilian realm is going to be the norm, not the exception, and advanced economies, which are more dependent on advanced information systems, will be at particular risk.

What’s more, offensive and defensive information warfare are tightly, insidiously coupled, which will significantly complicate military-industrial relations.

The expertise needed to defend against a cyberattack is essentially indistinguishable from that needed to make such an attack. The Stuxnet programmers are reported to have exploited proprietary information that had been voluntarily provided to the American government by Siemens, that German company that makes data-and-control programs used in nuclear power facilities — including Iran’s.

Siemens did this to help Washington build up its ability to fend off cyberattacks. Will Siemens and other companies think twice next time the American government calls? Probably. Whether it’s true or not, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the United States is now in the business of offensive information warfare, along with China, Israel and Russia, among others.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, the splintering of the global information technology industry into multiple camps according to their willingness to cooperate with governments on security matters. We can already see this happening in the telecommunications industry, where companies promote their products’ resistance to government intrusion. At the same time, other companies might see an advantage to working closely with the government.

Stuxnet also raises sticky and perhaps irresolvable legal questions. At present there is no real legal framework for adjudicating international cyberattacks; even if victims could determine who was responsible, their governments have few options outside of diplomatic complaints and, perhaps, retaliation in kind. An international entity that could legislate or enforce an information warfare armistice does not exist, and is not really conceivable.

A similar question exists within the United States. Under American law the transmission of malicious code is in many cases a criminal offense. This makes sense, given the economy’s reliance on information networks, the sensitivity of stored electronic data and the ever-present risk of attack from viruses, worms and other varieties of malware.

But the president, as commander in chief, does have some authority to conduct offensive information warfare against foreign adversaries. However, as with many presidential powers to wage war and conduct espionage, the extent of his authority has never been enumerated.

This legal ambiguity is problematic because such warfare is far less controllable than traditional military and intelligence operations, and it raises much more complex issues of private property, personal privacy and commercial integrity.

Therefore, before our courts are forced to consider the issue and potentially limit executive powers, as they did after President Harry Truman tried to seize steel plants in the early 1950s, Congress should grant the White House broad authority to wage offensive information warfare.

By explicitly authorizing these offensive operations in appropriate, defined circumstances, a new statute would strengthen the president’s power to provide for the common defense in cyberspace. Doing so wouldn’t answer all the questions that this new era of warfare presents. But one thing is sure: as bad as this arms race will be, losing it would be even worse.

Richard A. Falkenrath, a principal of the Chertoff Group, an investment advisory firm, is a former deputy commissioner for counterterrorism for the New York Police Department and deputy homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush.

    From Bullets to Megabytes, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27falkenrath.html

For the Funeral Too Distant, Mourners Gather on the Web

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON

In an age of commemorating birthdays, weddings and anniversaries on Facebook and Twitter, it was perhaps inevitable that live Web-streaming funerals for friends and loved ones would be next.

It is no surprise that the deaths of celebrities, like Michael Jackson, or honored political figures, like the United States diplomat Richard Holbrooke, are promoted as international Web events. So, too, was the memorial service for the six people killed Jan. 8 in Tucson, which had thousands of viewers on the Web.

But now the once-private funerals and memorials of less-noted citizens are also going online.

Several software companies have created easy-to-use programs to help funeral homes cater to bereaved families. FuneralOne a one-stop shop for online memorials that is based in St. Clair, Mich., has seen the number of funeral homes offering Webcasts increase to 1,053 in 2010, from 126 in 2008 (it also sells digital tribute DVDs).

During that same period, Event by Wire, a competitor in Half Moon Bay, Calif., watched the number of funeral homes live-streaming services jump to 300 from 80. And this month, the Service Corporation International in Houston, which owns 2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries, including the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said it was conducting a pilot Webcasting program at 16 of its funeral homes.

Traveling to funerals was once an important family rite, but with greater secularity and a mobile population increasingly disconnected from original hometowns, watching a funeral online can seem better than not going to a funeral at all. Social media, too, have redrawn the communal barriers of what is acceptable when relating to parents, siblings, friends and acquaintances.

“We are in a YouTube society now,” said H. Joseph Joachim IV, founder of FuneralOne. “People are living more than ever online, and this reflects that.”

Some of the Web-streamed funerals reflect the large followings gathered by individuals. On Jan. 11, more than 7,000 people watched the Santa Ana, Calif., funeral of Debbie Friedman, an iconic singer whose music combined Jewish text with folk rhythm. It was seen on Ustream, a Web video service, with more than 20,000 viewing it on-demand in the days that followed.

“We intended to watch a few minutes, but ended up watching almost the whole thing,” said Noa Kushner, a rabbi in San Anselmo, Calif., and a fan of Ms. Friedman’s music, who watched the service with a friend at his office. “I was so moved.”

After Stefanie Spielman, a breast cancer activist and the wife of the popular National Football League player Chris Spielman, died in 2009, the Spielmans wanted a private ceremony attended by 900 friends and family members, said Lajos Szabo, the chief strategy officer at Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service in Columbus, Ohio, which arranged the funeral. But they also hoped to accommodate members of the public, who wanted to support the family in its grief. Streamed live and posted online, Ms. Spielman’s funeral has been viewed 4,663 times by 2,989 visitors since November 2009, according to FuneralOne.

Other Webcasts are more obscure, but no less appreciated. Two weeks ago, a friend of Ronald Rich, a volunteer firefighter in Wallace, N.C., died unexpectedly. When Mr. Rich called the mother of his friend to say he could not make the eight-hour drive to the funeral because a snowstorm threatened to close roads, he said the mother offered to send an e-mail invitation so he could watch the service online. Mr. Rich said he watched the funeral: first by himself and a second time with his girlfriend.

“It was comforting to me,” he said, adding that he planned to watch it again with fellow firefighters.

The technology to put funerals online has been around for a decade but was slow to catch on with an industry understandably sensitive to questions of etiquette. Some funeral directors eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one, said John Reed, a past president of the National Funeral Directors Association. Other funeral directors worry that if the quality of the video is poor, it will reflect badly on the funeral home.

And the conversation about whether to stream a funeral online can be awkward, particularly if a grief-stricken family is wary of technology. Funeral directors are conservative, Mr. Reed said; privacy, even for the Facebook generation, is paramount. “We don’t jump on the first thing that comes along,” he said.

Still, some funeral directors offer the service for free (Mr. Reed is one of them) while others charge $100 to $300. If a family wants to keep the online service private, those invited get a password that allows access. (Mr. Joachim said 94 percent of the funerals his company Webcast were not password-protected.)

Not all real-life funeral attendees want their images captured online. Irene Dahl, an owner of Dahl Funeral Chapel in Bozeman, Mont., said a young man went to a funeral last year dressed as a woman and asked not to be filmed. “He did not want his mother to know,” Ms. Dahl said. “So we did not face the camera in his direction.”

Ms. Dahl said that nearly one-third of the ceremonies arranged by her funeral home last year — about 60 — were streamed live, at no extra charge. She became interested in this option after Dan Grumley, the chief executive of Event by Wire, visited her in 2008 and showed her how it worked.

“Being a funeral director is about helping people with their grief,” she said.

Russell Witek, the 14-year-old son of Karen Witek of Geneva, Ill., died of a brain tumor in 2009. The Conley Funeral Home in Elburn, Ill., offered to stream the funeral live to friends and family members. “We said, ‘Why not?’ ” Ms. Witek said. Her brother-in-law was working in the Middle East and could not attend. Russell’s home health nurse was out of town. “It was spring break,” Ms. Witek said.

She had met a number of friends on social media sites, including a patient-care support group and another for parents who home-schooled their children, and they could not attend, either. “I wanted them to experience it,” Ms. Witek said.

According to Conley Funeral Home, 186 people watched the funeral live on April 3, 2009, with an additional 511 watching it on-demand through Jan. 15.

Ms. Witek said her husband had watched the funeral more than once, “because he wanted to hear what was said that day,” but said she couldn’t bring herself to view it, except in parts. “After a child dies, you go into a fog.”

But for William Uzenski, the father of Nicholas Uzenski, a Marine serving in Afghanistan who was killed on Jan. 11, 2010, live Web-streaming has provided much comfort. Mr. Uzenski’s body was transported to his home, Bozeman, 10 days later. William Uzenski, himself a former Marine, said he wanted Nicholas’s military colleagues in Afghanistan to be able to watch the funeral. So Ms. Dahl arranged it through a military liaison who was assisting the family.

Ms. Dahl said that, unlike many streamed funerals, Nicholas Uzenski’s had three separate Webcasts and was invitation-only. The Webcasts included the arrival of his coffin at a local airport, the funeral and a graveside ceremony that his family said included a 21-gun salute. Ms. Dahl tracked virtual attendees. The funeral and the graveside ceremony were watched by 124 and 39 people, respectively, with the funeral viewed in 80 cities and 4 countries, including Afghanistan.

“Some e-mailed me,” Mr. Uzenski said. “Friends thanked us for sharing it with them. I do watch it again sometimes. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s healing.”

    For the Funeral Too Distant, Mourners Gather on the Web, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/fashion/25death.html

Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable

January 23, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC PFANNER

PARIS — After another year of plunging music sales, record company executives are starting to contemplate the unthinkable: The digital music business, held out as the future of the industry, may already be as big as it is going to get.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group based in London, said last week that sales of music in digital form had risen only 6 percent worldwide in 2010, even as the overall music market had shrunk 8 percent or 9 percent, extending a decade-long decline.

In each of the past two years, the rate of increase in digital revenue has approximately halved. If that trend continues, digital sales could top out at less than $5 billion this year, about a third of the overall music market but many billions of dollars short of the amount needed to replace long-gone sales of compact discs.

“Music’s first digital decade is behind us and what do we have?” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Not a lot of progress.”

“We are at one of the most worrying stages yet for the industry,” he continued. “As things stand now, digital music has failed.”

Music executives disagree, saying there is hope, as long as they can come to grips with piracy, which according to the industry federation accounts for the vast majority of music distributed online.

Stronger measures to crack down on unauthorized copying are taking effect in a number of countries, executives note, and even as the authorities wield a heavier stick, the complementary carrots are appearing, too, in the form of innovative digital services.

“The challenging environment continues, but we have some grounds for optimism,” said Frances Moore, chief executive of the music federation.

Ms. Moore said the recent introduction of tough anti-piracy laws in South Korea and France, which authorize cutting off the Internet connection of repeat offenders, showed that stricter enforcement could persuade listeners to seek out legal alternatives to unauthorized file-sharing services.

In South Korea, where the music business has long been blighted by piracy, digital music sales rose 14 percent in the first half of last year, after the new law went into effect in 2009, the federation said. The first account suspensions occurred in the autumn, and the group said the publicity surrounding the crackdown should help convert more consumers.

Max Hole, chief operating officer of Universal Music Group International, said his company, the biggest of the four major record companies, was so encouraged by the signs of a turnaround in South Korea that it had decided to start investing in the development of new music acts again, after suspending operations in South Korea several years ago.

France has also implemented a so-called graduated response system. In the French system, cutting Internet access is preceded by several warnings. While the authorities say they have sent out hundreds of thousands of e-mails to suspected copyright cheats, nobody’s connection has yet been cut.

Record company executives said they were also encouraged by recent legal action in the United States to cripple the file-sharing service LimeWire, as well as by the progress in the U.S. Senate of a bill to give law enforcement officials more power to shut down file-sharing services.

In Europe, the industry has notched legal victories against other sites accused of abetting piracy, including The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

Industry executives say they are encouraged by the development of new digital services, particularly those that embrace the principles of cloud computing. These services can provide unlimited amounts of music to listeners on demand, through a variety of devices, from mobile phones to televisions.

“The television is a great opportunity,” said Thomas Hesse, head of the digital business at Sony Music Entertainment. “We haven’t innovated in the living room for many years.”

Around the world, 10 million people have already signed up for subscription-based online services from Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, some of which have attracted additional millions of users with free, advertising-supported services. Many executives hope the growth of offerings like these can reduce the industry’s dependence on sales of individual tracks through digital stores like Apple iTunes, a model that has attracted little interest from young music fans, particularly outside the United States.

Yet some services that were hailed as potential iTunes challengers when they were introduced are fading from the scene. Nokia, the mobile phone manufacturer, said this month that it was sharply scaling back a service that gives buyers of certain phones free, unlimited music downloads. Sky, the British pay-television and broadband provider, recently canceled a subscription music service.

Music executives say Internet service providers hold the key to solving the piracy problems and helping the music companies recoup lost revenue. For the most part, providers have balked at taking stronger action against file-sharing, saying they do not want to snoop on their customers.

But one provider in Ireland, Eircom, recently started instituting its own version of a graduated response system. Customers who illegally download music face a “graduated response” similar to the one in France, but they can avoid the threat of disconnection by using a new music service from Eircom that offers free, unlimited streaming.

Mr. Mulligan said tougher enforcement would succeed only if music companies and other rights holders, including collecting agencies that represent artists and composers, embraced digital services that met the needs and interests of consumers, particularly teenagers and young adults.

Rights holders have grown more flexible as industry sales have collapsed, but they remain reluctant to license their music to some services. For example, Spotify, a popular streaming service in Europe, has yet to sign the record company deals it needs to open a U.S. site. Meanwhile, Internet companies like YouTube have sometimes struggled to reach agreements to show music videos in Europe.

The industry has also balked at the unlimited MP3 format, which comes with no copy restrictions, allowing people to share music with friends or provide soundtracks for their own videos, or post songs to social networking sites.

With growth in digital revenue slowing nearly to a standstill, analysts say, it is no surprise that talk of mergers and buyouts is again swirling around some of the Big Four music companies — Universal, Sony, Warner Music Group and EMI. Warner, for example, is said to have hired bankers to explore a sale of the company or a purchase of EMI.

“What has been keeping labels afloat has been the digital story,” said Mr. Mulligan, of Forrester Research. “If, all of a sudden, what they have been telling the market is the future turns out to be a failure, that radically changes the conversation.”

    Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable, NYT, 23.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/technology/24music.html

At Google, a Boost From E-Commerce

January 20, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Google’s strong fourth-quarter earnings proved that it is now firmly ensconced in e-commerce, and also showed that, with its Android operating system and related apps, it is smoothly transitioning to the mobile world.

But that news, reported on Thursday, was quickly followed by the announcement that Larry Page, a Google co-founder, will replace Eric E. Schmidt as chief executive in April.

The move marks a return to the helm of the company for Mr. Page, who left the role in 2001 when Google was still a private company. Mr. Schmidt will become executive chairman, focusing on outside partnerships and government outreach, the company said.

The upheaval at the top may have overshadowed the earnings report, but the numbers were good. Google benefited from the best online holiday shopping season since 2006, as Web users increasingly began their shopping sprees at the search engine.

“Whenever e-commerce improves, we see more advertisers competing for the same keywords, and that means more revenue for Google,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, an Internet analyst at Caris & Company.

To make it easier for shoppers to find what they were looking for, Google in the run-up to the holiday season introduced tools like Boutiques.com and search results that showed which offline stores have an item in stock. It also began offering retailers product ads with images.

Google reported on Thursday that net income in the quarter ended Dec. 31 was $2.54 billion, or $7.81 a share, up from $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, in the year-ago quarter. Excluding the cost of stock options and the related tax benefits, Google’s fourth-quarter profit was $8.75 a share, up from $6.79.

The company said revenue climbed 17 percent, to $8.44 billion, from $6.67 billion a year earlier. Net revenue, which excludes commissions paid to advertising partners, was $6.37 billion, up from $4.95 billion.

“Our strong performance has been driven by a rapidly growing digital economy, continuous product innovation that benefits both users and advertisers, and by the extraordinary momentum of our newer businesses, such as display and mobile,” Mr. Schmidt said in a statement.

While Google’s e-commerce offerings drove its search business during the quarter, the company also began to convince investors that it is successfully moving into new businesses, particularly mobile and display ads.

On a call after the earnings report, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president for product management, said the winners of 2010 were Google’s display advertising business, which now has two million publishers; YouTube, where revenue doubled; businesses that have begun using Google products; and Android, with 300,000 phones activated a day.

Mr. Rosenberg also said there were 10 times as many searches year over year done from Android devices, which translates into advertising revenue for Google.

Google has been selling display ads, those with images and sometimes video, on YouTube and other Web sites. The company does not break out display ad revenue, but eMarketer, a research firm, estimated that Google accounted for 13.4 percent of display ad revenue in the United States last year, up from 4.7 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, Yahoo, the market leader, lost share, eMarketer said.

Google’s mobile business is particularly promising, analysts said, as people increasingly neglect the laptops on their desks for the phones in their pockets.

For Google to maintain its dominance, it has needed to follow them, which it has been doing with apps to search the Web on the go, look up directions, watch videos, find local businesses and even make phone calls.

This year, Mr. Rosenberg said, the company will focus on products that allow people to access local information on mobile phones, as well as commerce, adding that the two are tied together.

“They key to unlocking mobile commerce was to make it easier for people to both search and then consummate the transaction on the mobile device,” he said.

“As smartphones become ubiquitous and local businesses put their inventory online, I think this will be the year that smartphones” change the way commerce is done, he added.

Still, other Google businesses have yet to find success. Google TV has faced delays and poor reviews; the Justice Department is still deciding whether to permit Google to acquire the flight software company ITA; and analysts are watching closely to see if the iPhone’s debut on Verizon affects sales of Android phones.

Also, analysts expressed concern about Google’s spending; the company is continually hiring and paid more than $2 billion for a building in New York to house growing operations.

    At Google, a Boost From E-Commerce, NYT, 20.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/technology/21google.html

In Google Shake-Up, an Effort to Revive Start-Up Spark

January 20, 2011
The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — Google made the biggest management shake-up in a decade on Thursday, handing the reins of the company to one of its co-founders in an effort to rediscover its start-up roots.

As it has grown into the dominant company in Silicon Valley, Google has lost some of its entrepreneurial culture and become a slower-moving bureaucracy, analysts and insiders say, in contrast to Facebook, Twitter and other younger, more agile competitors.

To counter this, the company announced that Larry Page, its 38-year-old co-founder, would take over as chief executive from Eric E. Schmidt, a technology industry veteran who was brought in a decade ago to provide adult supervision, as Silicon Valley calls it.

Mr. Schmidt, 55, will remain executive chairman of the company, which had a market value of $200 billion at the close of trading on Thursday, up from $27 billion when it went public in 2004.

“One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up,” said Mr. Page in a telephone interview on Thursday. He will start his new role in April.

The shake-up comes at a time of major upheaval in Silicon Valley. The company, and the search industry, face challenges on several fronts.

Google remains immensely powerful and successful — as demonstrated by the stellar quarterly financial results it reported Thursday.

But the sudden rise of Facebook has exposed Google’s failures in areas like social networking and threatens its vast share of the online advertising market. Meanwhile, although Google has had success in new areas like mobile and display advertising, it has struggled to branch out into other businesses like television.

The unspoken fear within Google is that it could become like Microsoft, a once-dominant technology company that seems past its prime and perceived as stodgier, despite successes like XBox and Kinect. Indeed, for all its financial success, Google, which has 24,400 employees, is no longer considered by many top engineers as the most desirable place to work in the Valley; a new generation of start-ups has taken that place.

And in recent years, Google has lost scores of engineers and a string of high-profile senior executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, now chief operating officer at Facebook, and Tim Armstrong, now chief executive of AOL.

Mr. Page led the company in its early days but relinquished that role in 2001, when it was still private. In tapping him to return to the post, Google becomes one of the few major companies in the Valley to be put under the control of a founder after being run for so long by a professional manager. To some, the move signaled a kind of coming-of-age for Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who were in their late 20s when Mr. Schmidt took over. Even Mr. Schmidt characterized it as a moment for the training wheels to come off.

On his Twitter account, Mr. Schmidt wrote: “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.” Later, on a conference call with analysts after Thursday’s earnings report, he said, “I believe Larry is ready,” adding, “It’s time for him to have a shot at running this.”

The management move ends an unusual experiment in which Google, the world’s largest Internet company, was run jointly by a troika of Mr. Schmidt; Mr. Page, who was president of products; and Sergey Brin, 37, the company’s other co-founder and its president of technology.

In the interview, Mr. Page also explained the move as an effort to streamline, saying the three had selected him as the top decision-maker because of “the pace of decision-making and the scale of the company.” Mr. Brin, who joined Mr. Page and Mr. Schmidt in the interview, said the three-way process confused employees.

“We wanted to make it clear to all the executives and the managers who report to us where they should send an e-mail,” he said.

Mr. Page and Mr. Schmidt said the decision was mutual. “I don’t think there’s another person in the universe that could have done as good a job as Eric has done in the company,” Mr. Page said.

The relationship between the founders and Mr. Schmidt was rocky during its early years, as the founders frequently undercut Mr. Schmidt’s decisions. Although they worked well together for the last several years, there remained recurring strains.

Ken Auletta, the author of “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It,” said in an interview that while Mr. Schmidt may simply have been ready for a change after 10 years, he may have received some encouragement to step aside.

“I don’t think he was pushed aside, but he may have been nudged,” he said.

Under Mr. Schmidt’s helm, Google has prospered, but over the years, it has become less attractive to some engineers, who say it has become harder to develop new ideas while working there. The problem is one that all big companies face, but it is more pressing in Silicon Valley, where the most talented engineers tend to have the strongest entrepreneurial drive. Google has tried to retain dissatisfied employees with perks like giving them time to work on new projects. But some insiders say those incentives have lost effectiveness.

The news of the change rocked Silicon Valley, with analysts and company insiders offering varying theories. Some said Mr. Schmidt was tired of the day-to-day hassles of management. Mr. Schmidt said in the interview, “I would tell you, frankly, a decade is a long time to be a C.E.O., and Larry will discover this.”

Others say Mr. Page always planned to re-assert his authority at some point.

“Larry has wanted to be C.E.O., so that’s not a surprise,” said a former Google sales executive who would speak only anonymously to preserve his relationship with a powerful company. “But the timing — I’ve talked to people at Google today and they were just flabbergasted.”

Esther Dyson, a veteran Valley investor who has long known the Google founders and Mr. Schmidt, said, “It is unexpected but it makes a lot of sense.” She added: “Larry and Sergey have grown up. They want to run their own company.”

After the management change, Mr. Brin will concentrate on several new products, which he declined to name, while Mr. Schmidt will focus on external business partnerships and government outreach, including fighting regulators’ concerns about Google’s growing power.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin co-founded Google when they were graduate students in computer science at Stanford in 1998.

Mr. Page is aloof, cerebral, intensely private and occasionally brusque. While Mr. Brin is more gregarious, the two didn’t trust outside investors and sought to keep control of the company.

The co-founders and Mr. Schmidt all have controlling stakes in the company. Forbes magazine recently estimated that Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had a net worth of $15 billion each, and Mr. Schmidt, $5.5 billion.

The former executive said the change might be a welcome one if it helps launch products more quickly. “In that respect, getting one of the co-founders in place might be just the energy charge folks need.”

    In Google Shake-Up, an Effort to Revive Start-Up Spark, NYT, 20.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/technology/21chief.html

Ex-Swiss Banker Gives Data to WikiLeaks

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By RAVI SOMAIYA and JULIA WERDIGIER

LONDON — A former Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity.

Rudolf M. Elmer, the former head of the Cayman Islands office of the prominent Swiss bank Julius Baer, refused to identify any of the individuals or companies, but told reporters at a press conference that about 40 politicians and “pillars of society” worldwide are among them.

He told The Observer newspaper over the weekend that those named in the documents come from “the U.S., Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia — from all over,” and include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates — from both sides of the Atlantic.”

Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks would verify and release the information, including the names, in as little as two weeks. He suggested possible partnerships with financial news organizations and said he would consider turning the information over to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, a government agency that investigates financial corruption.

Mr. Elmer said he had turned to WikiLeaks to educate society about what he considers an unfair system designed to serve the rich and aid money launderers after his offers to provide the data to universities and governments were spurned and, in his opinion, the Swiss media failed to cover the substance of his allegations. “The man in the street needs to know how this system works,” he said, referring to the offshore trusts that many “high net worth individuals” across the world use to evade taxes.

His former employers released a statement on Friday denying all wrongdoing and suggesting that Mr. Elmer’s aim was to “discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public.” It accused him of using falsified documents and spreading “baseless accusations” and passing on “unlawfully acquired, respectively retained, documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks.”

On Monday, Mr. Elmer declined say how he had obtained the documents, which were on two CDs. He faces trial in Switzerland on Wednesday on charges of stealing the information from the bank. He was held for 30 days in 2005 over allegations that he violated Swiss banking secrecy laws, falsified documents and sent threatening messages to two people at the bank.

WikiLeaks and Bank Julius Baer previously clashed in early 2008 when the anti-secrecy organization published hundreds of documents pertaining to its offshore activities. On that occasion, it did not identify the 15 individuals concerned. But the bank succeeded, briefly, in gaining a court order to shut down the WikiLeaks.org Web site anyway. The injunction was subsequently overturned and the case was dropped.

The offshore banking industry has come under increasing pressure from whistle-blowers like Mr. Elmer over the last two years. In 2009, Bradley Birkenfeld, a former private banker for UBS, was sentenced to more than three years in prison after refusing to admit his own role in the Swiss bank’s efforts to help American clients evade taxes.

Prosecutors did, however, credit Mr. Birkenfeld for helping to disclose some illegal tactics in the industry. As a result of Mr. Birkenfeld’s disclosures, UBS agreed to turn over details of several thousand client accounts to the Internal Revenue Service as part of a legal settlement. UBS agreed to pay a $780 million fine and admitted criminal wrongdoing.

In London on Monday, Mr. Assange said that financial institutions “operate outside the rule of law” because of their economic power. WikiLeaks itself had, he said, been “economically censored” by companies like Visa and MasterCard, which stopped processing donations to it late last year in response to its release of hundreds of thousands of classified United States documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of State Department cables.

WikiLeaks has also said it would release information from an American bank, thought to be the contents of a Bank of America executive’s hard drive, early this year. But, Mr. Assange said, the site is not fully “open for public business” owing to the weight of the existing leaks it is struggling to process.

He would not comment on continuing proceedings to extradite him from Britain to Sweden to face allegations of sexual wrongdoing brought by two women in Stockholm last summer. He will next appear in a London court on Feb. 7 and 8.

The United States is also widely thought to be conducting an investigation into Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks, in connection with the release of the classified United States government and military information.

    Ex-Swiss Banker Gives Data to WikiLeaks, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/global/18baer.html

Israel Tests on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID E. SANGER

This article is by William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger.

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.

The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.

The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Seimens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.

But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”

In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.

For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock,” a senior administration official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. “And now, we have a bit more.”

Finding Weaknesses

Paranoia helped, as it turns out.

Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.

Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.

The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.

“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.

In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.

But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. “If you look for the weak links in the system,” said one former American official, “this one jumps out.”

Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.

Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.

Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.

But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.

That deepened the mystery.

A ‘Dual Warhead’

No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.

He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.

“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”

This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.

In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.

Testing the Worm

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge knowledge was critical.”

Another clue involves the United States. It obtained a cache of P-1’s after Libya gave up its nuclear program in late 2003, and the machines were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, another arm of the Energy Department.

By early 2004, a variety of federal and private nuclear experts assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency were calling for the United States to build a secret plant where scientists could set up the P-1’s and study their vulnerabilities. “The notion of a test bed was really pushed,” a participant at the C.I.A. meeting recalled.

The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week, may also have played a role in Stuxnet testing.

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

“They failed hopelessly,” one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for “plausible deniability.”

In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, broke the country’s silence about the worm’s impact on its enrichment program, saying a cyberattack had caused “minor problems with some of our centrifuges.” Fortunately, he added, “our experts discovered it.”

The most detailed portrait of the damage comes from the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington. Last month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that said Iran’s P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of failures in mid- to late 2009 that culminated in technicians taking 984 machines out of action.

The report called the failures “a major problem” and identified Stuxnet as the likely culprit.

Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions have hurt its effort to build more advanced (and less temperamental) centrifuges. And last January, and again in November, two scientists who were believed to be central to the nuclear program were killed in Tehran.

The man widely believed to be responsible for much of Iran’s program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a college professor, has been hidden away by the Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.

Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties between Stuxnet and Iran’s problems. But in recent weeks, they have given revised and surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehran’s nuclear status.

“A number of technological challenges and difficulties” have beset Iran’s program, Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli public radio late last month.

The troubles, he added, “have postponed the timetable.”

    Israel Tests on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html

In an Online Game Forum, Tucson Suspect Lashed Out

January 14, 2011
The New York Times
By SARAH WHEATON

Logs of Jared L. Loughner’s conversations with fellow players in an online game of strategy show a young man who has become frustrated by his inability to find a job, who views his early education as tantamount to slavery, and who has frequent run-ins with his college professors.

In the archives of such conversations from April to June, obtained from the administrators of the game, Earth Empires, Mr. Loughner, using the name “Dare,” rails against his “scam” of an education and about his job search.

“How many applications — is a lot?” he asked on May 15, lamenting that he had gone six months without a paycheck. “I’m thinking — 2 misdemeanors hurt. Don’t do Graffiti.”

Mr. Loughner, 22, wrote that he had been fired five times, including after he walked out of a job at a Red Robin restaurant because of a “mental breakdown.”

“Currently 67 applications,” he wrote in mid-June. “No interview.”

Mr. Loughner said he was being discriminated against.

“CAN’T HOLD TERMINATION AGAINST FUTURE EMPLOYEE!” he wrote, repeating the line more than 100 times in one May posting. And in early June, he wrote that he was filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about his last workplace.

The conversations, which had been accessible only to players with a password to a forum associated with Earth Empires game, will be made available to the public on Friday evening, the administrators said. They decided to post an edited log of the conversations after reports about them appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Players who knew Mr. Loughner outside of the forums brought the logs to the attention of other gamers over the weekend. The accounts by “Dare” of confrontations with professors match records that have been released by Pima Community College, which Mr. Loughner attended.

Mr. Loughner also refers to his education between kindergarten and the 12th grade as 15,000 hours of “unpaid work.”

“Is prison a close resemblance of high school?” he asked on May 15. “Relearning the English language. How many languages are there? Why am I a salve?” he continued, apparently meaning “slave.”

“The more I read Dare’s posts, the more I think he’s just drunk/high when he posts,” one player responded.

“I have no substance abuse problems currently,” Mr. Loughner replied. “Dude — I feel as if there is something wrong — ”

Another player added, “I think he seems like one of those people who avoids substance abuse because he is already strange.”

Mr. Loughner’s conversations took place among members of an “alliance” known as SancTuarY within Earth Empires, where players try to develop a country by teaming up with some competitors and undercutting others. Most are men between 20 and 40 years old, an administrator said.

Some of the SancTuarY alliance’s private forums are devoted to the business of dominating their online world. But players also vent, joke and share news and advice about final examinations and relationships. The language can be coarse, the political debates philosophical.

“This is like my social life,” Mr. Loughner wrote on May 15.

He uses the forums to talk about his course work, saying he had developed a “strong interest in logic.” On multiple occasions, he refers to an online grammar game for children that he is playing for a class.

He employs formal logical proofs to engage other players in debates about beating mentally disabled children to create more space in schools and about raping women. But, by his own account, Mr. Loughner ran into trouble when he tried to use similar proofs when meeting with a guidance counselor after being thrown out of a college mathematics course.

“Told her about a logical argument, but didn’t mention attending the logic class, that the logical argument was relevant. Told her about brainwashing a child and how that can change the view of mathematics,” he wrote on June 3. “I had to learn my abc’s and 123’s before entering college. Told her it was scam because of the possibility of failing the class.”

In the same conversation thread, Mr. Loughner writes, "The poetry teacher said i touched my self," repeating it three times.

    In an Online Game Forum, Tucson Suspect Lashed Out, NYT, 14.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/us/15game.html

Accused Soldier in Brig as WikiLeaks Link Is Sought

January 13, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the flamboyant founder of WikiLeaks, is living on a supporter’s 600-acre estate outside London, where he has negotiated $1.7 million in book deals and regularly issues defiant statements about the antisecrecy group’s plans.

Meanwhile, the young soldier accused of leaking the secret documents that brought WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange to fame and notoriety is locked in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. The soldier, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who turned 23 last month in the military prison, is accused of the biggest leak of classified documents in American history. He awaits trial on charges that could put him in prison for 52 years, according to the Army.

Even as members of Congress denounce both men’s actions as criminal, the Justice Department is still looking for a charge it can press against Mr. Assange, demanding from Twitter the account records, credit card numbers and bank account information of several of his associates. Legal experts say there are many obstacles to a prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder, but one approach under consideration is to link the two men in a conspiracy to disclose classified material.

Accusations from supporters that Private Manning is being mistreated, perhaps to pressure him to testify against Mr. Assange, have rallied many on the political left to his defense. The assertions have even drawn the attention of the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Mendez, who said he had submitted a formal inquiry about the soldier’s treatment to the State Department.

Private Manning’s cause has been taken up by the nation’s best-known leaker of classified secrets, Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. He denounces Private Manning’s seven months in custody and media coverage that has emphasized the soldier’s sexual orientation (he is gay) and personal troubles. Mr. Ellsberg, 79, calls him a courageous patriot.

“I identify with him very much,” Mr. Ellsberg said. “He sees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d say correctly, as I saw Vietnam — as hopeless ventures that are wrong and involve a great deal of atrocities.”

The military rejects accusations that Private Manning has been mistreated. “Poppycock,” said Col. T. V. Johnson, a Quantico spokesman. He insisted that the conditions of confinement were dictated by brig rules for a pretrial detainee like Private Manning. The soldier has been designated for “maximum custody” — applied because his escape would pose a national security risk — and placed on “prevention-of-injury watch,” restrictions imposed so that he does not injure himself.

That status is based on the judgment of military medical experts and the observations of brig guards, Colonel Johnson said. Guards check Private Manning every five minutes but allow him to sleep without interruption from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., when only dim night lights are on, unless they need to wake him to be certain he is breathing.

Colonel Johnson denied that Private Manning was in solitary confinement, as has been widely claimed, saying that he could talk with guards and with prisoners in nearby cells, though he could not see them. He leaves his 6-by-12-foot cell for a daily hour of exercise, and for showers, phone calls, meetings with his lawyer and weekend visits by friends and relatives, the colonel said.

The prisoner can read and watch television and correspond with people on an approved list. He is not permitted to speak to the media.

“Pfc. Manning is being treated just like every other detainee in the brig,” said an internal military review concluded on Dec. 27 and read to a reporter by Colonel Johnson. “His treatment is firm, fair and respectful.”

The soldier’s lawyer, David E. Coombs, declined to comment for this article, and two people who have visited him at Quantico — Private Manning’s aunt, Debra Van Alstyne, and a friend who is an M.I.T. graduate student, David M. House — did not respond to queries.

In an interview with MSNBC last month, Mr. House said of his friend that he had “noticed a remarkable decline in his psychological state and his physical well-being.” He said that Private Manning appeared “very weak from a lack of exercise” and that “psychologically, he has difficulty keeping up with some conversational topics.”

In an account on Mr. Coombs’s Web site of his client’s “typical day,” he detailed the restrictions on the soldier but called the guards’ conduct “professional.”

“At no time have they tried to bully, harass or embarrass Pfc. Manning,” he wrote.

Asked why the case appears to be moving so slowly, an Army spokeswoman, Shaunteh Kelly, said that the defense had requested a delay in July and that a “706 board,” or mental health evaluation, was not complete.

She added in an e-mail that “Cases involving computers and classified information are very complex and require methodical investigation,” and that all lawyers, members of the 706 board and military investigators needed to get proper clearances.

Mr. Assange, with his provocative statements, his recognizable shock of white hair and the accusations of sexual misconduct he faces in Sweden, has become WikiLeaks’s public face. But while he began WikiLeaks in 2006, overseeing a steady trickle of revelations, the site drew broad attention for the first time only when it began to release the material that Private Manning is accused of downloading from his computer in Iraq, where he was a low-level intelligence analyst.

The material includes a video showing two American helicopters shooting at people in Baghdad in 2007, two of them Reuters journalists who were killed; thousands of field reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and 251,287 cables sent between American embassies and the State Department.

If Private Manning was indeed the source of the documents, as he suggested in online chat logs made public by Wired magazine, it is he who is largely responsible for making WikiLeaks a household name and the target of fury from the Pentagon, the State Department and members of Congress of both parties.

He is the only person charged in the WikiLeaks case so far. And despite his supporters’ suspicions that he will be pressured to testify against Mr. Assange, the Army spokeswoman, Ms. Kelly, said that to date, Private Manning had not spoken with civilian investigators or prosecutors.

Mr. Assange has often spoken highly of the soldier, to whose defense fund WikiLeaks has donated more than $100,000. In an article in the British magazine New Statesman on Thursday that called Private Manning “the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience,” Mr. Assange said he believed the Justice Department’s goal was to force the soldier to confess “that he somehow conspired with me to harm the security of the United States.”

“Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step,” Mr. Assange said.

    Accused Soldier in Brig as WikiLeaks Link Is Sought, NYT? 13.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/world/14manning.html

U.S. Subpoenas Twitter Accounts of WikiLeaks Figures

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — The United States Department of Justice has issued a subpoena for the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the WikiLeaks organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and official documents.

The subpoena, issued last month, offers the most detail yet about how the United States government is conducting its investigation, and likely prosecution, of WikiLeaks officials and their anti-secrecy campaign to release classified and often highly sensitive documents on the Internet. A task force composed of dozens of Pentagon and justice department officials, among others, has been active for months in investigating the damage done to American diplomatic and military operations.

The quest to get the information from five prominent figures at the group was revealed Saturday when Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s parliament, received a notification of the subpoena from Twitter, a social Web site that allows users to post short messages. The United States government, she said in a subsequent message, “wants to know about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” The subpoena, obtained by the Web site Salon.com, was issued by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Dec. 14 and asks for the complete account information of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the United States Army intelligence specialist awaiting a military court martial under suspicion of leaking materials to WikiLeaks, as well as Ms. Jonsdottir, Mr. Assange and two computer programmers, Rop Gongrijp and Jacob Appelbaum.

Mr. Appelbaum wrote on his Twitter account on Saturday that the lawyers for the short-messaging service had been responsible for getting the grand jury subpoena unsealed and warned followers against sending him private messages. “Do not send me Direct Messages,” he wrote. “My twitter account contents have apparently been invited to the (presumably-Grand Jury) in Alexandria.”

While many messages on Twitter are posted publicly, the service also allows users to send private or “direct” messages to other users.

The subpoena was unsealed on Jan. 5, which allowed Twitter to inform those concerned.

The facsimile of the subpoena showed that it had been authorized by the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., outside Washington, an office that has often been used by the federal government in highly sensitive criminal inquiries. Some published reports in recent weeks have suggested that the justice department may have secretly empanelled a grand jury in Virginia to take evidence in the WikiLeaks probe. But a tickbox on the subpoena saying “grand jury information” was left blank.

Ms. Jonsdottir did not immediately return messages seeking comment but has said in messages on Twitter that she will fight the subpoena.

Of the five individuals named in the subpoena, only two — Mr. Manning and Jacob Appelbaum — are American citizens. The others include an Australian, Mr. Assange, Ms. Jonsdottir, from Iceland, Mr. Gongrijp, a Dutch national. This immediately raised the possibility of a diplomatic row between the United States and allied nations whose citizens were among those covered by the subpoena. They could argue that American laws were being used to stifle free communications between individuals who were not American citizens, and who were not in the United States at the time of the messages that were the target of the subpoena.

An early indication of the potential for protest came from Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian, who used her Twitter account to ask, “Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?” In a later Twitter messages, she said she had spoken to Iceland’s minister of justice, who, she said, was “now looking into the case.” She said she had also spoken to Iceland’s interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, who, she said, had described the subpoena as “very odd and grave.”

Twitter said it would not comment on the specific case, but noted that its policy is “to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so.”

In messages on its own Twitter feed, WikiLeaks confirmed the subpoena, and suggested that Google and Facebook might also have been issued with such legal demands. A communications official for Facebook said on Saturday that the company had no comment.

The unsealed subpoena offers the first window into how the United States has been maneuvering to build its case against Mr. Assange. The government, in seeking all information related to the accounts since Nov. 1, 2009, is likely hoping to discover private discussions about the leaks or details of timing to help prove that either Mr. Assange or one of his surrogates pushed Mr. Manning to leak the government documents.

The Justice Department has so far avoided discussing details its investigation into WikiLeaks and declined to outline any grand jury activity, though Attorney General Eric Holder said he authorized investigators to take “significant” steps.

But those familiar with the department’s actions said there is intense pressure to find some way of criminally prosecuting Mr. Assange as a co-conspirator in order to deter future large-scale leaks via the Internet. The subpoena, unsealed on Saturday, describes an “ongoing criminal investigation.”

By seeking to prove Mr. Assange was a conspirator in the leak, the government seeks to differentiate the actions of WikiLeaks from those of traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose government information.

The United States has also taken steps to protect against future leaks, including suggesting employees of various agencies that handle sensitive material take measures to evaluate the “trustworthiness” of co-workers, according to a memo circulated last week by the Office of Management and Budget.

The memo, distributed to the heads of all executive branch departments and agencies, urged managers to implement programs that can evaluate “insider threats” and “detect behavioral changes in cleared employees.”

“Do you use a psychiatrist or sociologist to measure despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness?” the memo asks agencies to consider.

In a message on Saturday, WikiLeaks compared the subpoena to the Iranian government seeking information on activists in that country. Using the acronym for direct messages, the only messages on Twitter that are not publicly accessible for some users, it said, “If the Iranian govt asked for DMS of Iranian activists, State Dept. would be all over this violation of ‘Internet freedom.’ ”

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

    U.S. Subpoenas Twitter Accounts of WikiLeaks Figures, NYT, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/09wiki.html

U.S. Cautions People Named In Cable Leaks

January 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The State Department is warning hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and businesspeople identified in leaked diplomatic cables of potential threats to their safety and has moved a handful of them to safer locations, administration officials said Thursday.

The operation, which involves a team of 30 in Washington and embassies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, reflects the administration’s fear that the disclosure of cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks has damaged American interests by exposing foreigners who supply valuable information to the United States.

Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed. But they caution that many dissidents are under constant harassment from their governments, so it is difficult to be certain of the cause of actions against them.

The officials declined to discuss details about people contacted by the State Department in recent weeks, saying only that a few were relocated within their home countries and that a few others were moved abroad.

The State Department is mainly concerned about the cables that have yet to be published or posted on Web sites — nearly 99 percent of the archive of 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks. With cables continuing to trickle out, they said, protecting those identified will be a complex, delicate and long-term undertaking. The State Department said it had combed through a majority of the quarter-million cables and distributed many to embassies for review by diplomats there.

“We feel responsible for doing everything possible to protect these people,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, who is overseeing the effort. “We’re taking it extremely seriously.”

Contrary to the administration’s initial fears, the fallout from the cables on the diplomatic corps itself has been manageable. The most visible casualty so far could be Gene A. Cretz, the ambassador to Libya, who was recalled from his post last month after his name appeared on a cable describing peculiar personal habits of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. While no decision has been made on Mr. Cretz’s future, officials said he was unlikely to return to Tripoli. In addition, one midlevel diplomat has been moved from his post in an undisclosed country.

But other senior diplomats initially considered at risk — for example, the ambassador to Russia, John R. Beyrle, whose name was on cables critical of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin — appeared to have weathered the disclosures.

There is anecdotal evidence that the disclosure of the cables has chilled daily contacts between human rights activists and diplomats. An American diplomat in Central Asia said recently that one Iranian contact, who met him on periodic trips outside Iran, told him he would no longer speak to him. Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, said people in Afghanistan and Pakistan had become more reluctant to speak to human rights investigators for fear that what they said might be made public.

WikiLeaks came under fire from human rights organizations last July, after it released a large number of documents about the war in Afghanistan without removing the names of Afghan citizens who had assisted the American military. When it later released documents about the Iraq war, the group stripped names from the documents.

A Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Chris Perrine, said Thursday that the military was not aware of any confirmed case of harm to anyone as a result of being named in the Afghan war documents. But he noted that the Taliban had said it would study the WikiLeaks documents to punish collaborators with the Americans.

State Department officials believe that a wide range of foreigners who have spoken candidly to American diplomats could be at risk if publicly identified. For example, a businessman who spoke about official corruption, a gay person in a society intolerant of homosexuality or a high-ranking government official who criticized his bosses could face severe reprisals, the officials said.

Human rights advocates share the State Department’s concern that many people could be at risk if cables become public without careful redaction. “There are definitely people named in the cables who would be very much endangered,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch.

In one case, Mr. Malinowski said, the State Department asked Human Rights Watch to inform a person in a Middle Eastern country that his exchanges with American diplomats had been reported in a cable.

In addition to The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel have had the entire cable database for several months. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten said last month that it had obtained the entire collection, and newspapers in several other countries have obtained a selection of cables relating to their regions.

WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, has said the group will continue to release additional cables on its own Web site as well, though to date it has moved cautiously and has reproduced the redactions made by newspapers publishing the cables.

Government officials are also worried that foreign intelligence services may be trying to acquire the cable collection, a development that would heighten concerns about the safety of those named in the documents.

For human rights activists in this country, disclosures by WikiLeaks, which was founded in 2006, have been a decidedly mixed development. Amnesty International gave WikiLeaks an award in 2009 for its role in revealing human rights violations in Kenya. Human Rights Watch wrote to President Obama last month to urge the administration not to pursue a prosecution of WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange.

But they are concerned that the cables could inflict their own kind of collateral damage, either by endangering diplomats’ sources or discouraging witnesses and victims of abuses from speaking to foreign supporters.

Sam Zarifi, director of Amnesty International’s operations in Asia, said the cables had provided valuable “empirical information” on abuses in several countries. “This is a new way to distribute information,” Mr. Zarifi said. “We just want to make sure it has the same safeguards as traditional journalism.”

    U.S. Cautions People Named In Cable Leaks, NYT, 6.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/world/07wiki.html

Facing Threat From WikiLeaks, Bank Plays Defense

January 2, 2011
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

By the time the conference call ended, it was nearly midnight at Bank of America’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., but the bank’s counterespionage work was only just beginning.

A day earlier, on Nov. 29, the director of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said in an interview that he intended to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. With Bank of America’s share price falling on the widely held suspicion that the hard drive was theirs, the executives on the call concluded it was time to take action.

Since then, a team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation — scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised.

In addition to the internal team drawn from departments like finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, to help manage the review. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.

The company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, receives regular updates on the team’s progress, according to one Bank of America executive familiar with the team’s work, who, like other bank officials, was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential inquiry.

Whether Mr. Assange is bluffing, or indeed has Bank of America in its sights at all, the bank’s defense strategy represents the latest twist in the controversy over WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.

The United States government has been examining whether Mr. Assange, an Australian, could be charged criminally for the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department diplomatic cables that became the subject of articles in The New York Times and other publications last month.

The Swedish government is also seeking to question Mr. Assange about rape accusations against him. As he fights extradition from Britain in that case, he remains under house arrest in an English mansion. Mr. Assange has said the timing of the rape accusations was not coincidental, and that he was the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States government.

Despite his legal troubles, Mr. Assange’s threats have grown more credible with every release of secret documents, including those concerning the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, the treatment of prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most recently, the trove of diplomatic cables.

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.

“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”

Last month, the bank bought up Web addresses that could prove embarrassing to the company or its top executives in the event of a large-scale public assault, but a spokesman for the bank said the move was unrelated to any possible leak.

Then, on Dec. 18, Bank of America may have antagonized Mr. Assange further when it said it would join other companies like MasterCard and PayPal in halting the processing of payments intended for WikiLeaks, citing the possibility the organization’s activities might be illegal.

Mr. Assange has never said explicitly that the data he possesses comes from Bank of America, which is the nation’s largest bank, though he did say that the disclosure would take place sometime early this year.

The bank has emerged as the most likely target because a year before the latest threat, Mr. Assange said in an interview that his group had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive containing five gigabytes of data — enough to hold more than 200,000 pages of text — and was evaluating how to present it. It was this connection that set the wheels in motion on Nov. 30.

The financial markets took the threat seriously. Bank of America shares fell 3 percent in trading the day after Mr. Assange made his threat against a nameless bank, and while the stock has since recovered, the prospect of a Bank of America data dump from WikiLeaks remains a concern, said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst with Credit Suisse.

“The fears have calmed down somewhat, but if there is something out there that is revealed, the market reaction will be negative,” he said.

Bank of America’s internal review has turned up no evidence that would substantiate Mr. Assange’s claim that he has a hard drive, according to interviews with executives there. The company declined to otherwise comment on the case. A WikiLeaks representative also declined to comment.

With the data trail cold, one working theory both inside and outside the bank is that internal documents in Mr. Assange’s possession, if any, probably came from the mountains of material turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congressional investigators and the New York attorney general’s office during separate investigations in 2009 and 2010 into the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

As it happens, Mr. Assange’s first mention of the Bank of America hard drive, in October 2009, coincided with hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the Merrill merger, and with wide-ranging requests for information by the committee.

The bank’s investigative team is trying to reconstruct the handover of materials to public agencies for a variety of inquiries, in pursuit of previously undisclosed documents that could embarrass the company, bank officials said.

In addition to the Merrill documents, the team is reviewing material on Bank of America’s disastrous acquisition in 2008 of Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage specialist, the officials said. The criticism of Bank of America’s foreclosure procedures centers mostly on loans it acquired in the Countrywide deal, and one possibility is that the documents could show unscrupulous or fraudulent lending practices by Countrywide.

If that is the case, it would not only reignite political pressure on Bank of America and other top mortgage servicers, but it could also strengthen the case of investors pressuring the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgages.

“If something happens, we want to be ready,” one bank official said. “You want to know what your options are before it comes out, rather than have to decide on the spot.” Bank of America’s efforts are complicated by the fact that it has made several huge acquisitions in recent years, and those once-independent companies had different computer systems and security procedures.

WikiLeaks has taken on private companies in the past, including leaking documents from Barclays of Britain and Bank Julius Baer of Switzerland, but neither disclosure drew nearly as much attention.

Officials at the S.E.C., the House oversight committee and the New York attorney general’s office insist the information they received had been turned over in the form of papers and discs, never a hard drive, and deny they are the source of the WikiLeaks cache.

At the same time, Mr. Assange’s own statements would seem to undermine the government-as-source theory, hinting instead that resignations might follow as evidence emerges of corruption among top executives, something the public investigations never found.

“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said in the November 2010 interview with Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”

Eric Dash and Louise Story contributed reporting.

    Facing Threat From WikiLeaks, Bank Plays Defense, NYT, 2.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/business/03wikileaks-bank.html