Secretly Monitor Cop Stops With New ACLU App

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey is unveiling an Android app allowing citizens to secretly record audio and video of police stops, and have the footage sent to the group’s servers for review.

“This app provides an essential tool for police accountability,” ACLU-NJ Executive Director Deborah Jacobs said in a statement. “Too often incidents of serious misconduct go unreported because citizens don’t feel that they will be believed. Here, the technology empowers citizens to place a check on police power directly.”

The Police Tape app is among a growing number of apps aimed at empowering citizens in their encounters with police activity. The New York chapter of the ACLU released a similar app last month, and others enable protesters to notify family, friends and attorneys if they’ve been arrested.

Its development comes two weeks after the death of Rodney King, whose 1991 video-taped beating at the hands of Los Angeles police seemingly ushered in new role of the citizen watchdog. Now two decades later, a wide swath of the public is armed with tiny recording devices — their mobile phones, and the ACLU is seeking to make it as easy as ever to capture the authorities with video or audio — though police officers never seem to be fans of the practice.

The latest app allows users to press a button on their Android device and it will secretly record video or audio, although the phone won’t look like it’s in recording mode. The recordings can be uploaded to the New Jersey affiliate’s servers, or simply stored on the phone in a non-obvious file system location.

The iPhone version is awaiting approval from Apple.

Alex Shalom, policy counsel for the New Jersey affiliate, said in a telephone interview that though the app is intended for residents of the Garden State, if the group believes somebody outside of New Jersey’s rights were violated, the group would send the footage to the appropriate ACLU affiliate for review.

“We think taping police is a good accountability tool,” he said. “We’re bringing it into the 21st Century.”

At least in this case, the feds don’t disagree with the ACLU. In May, the Justice Department said the public had a constitutional right to record the police in public.

 

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‘The Analyzer’ Gets Time Served for Million-Dollar Bank Heist

Ehud

Ehud Tenenbaum, aka “The Analyzer,” was quietly sentenced in New York this week to time served for a single count of bank-card fraud for his role in a sophisticated computer-hacking scheme that federal officials say scored $10 million from U.S. banks.

He was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $503,000 and was given three years probation.

The notorious Israeli hacker seemed to disappear after his 2008 arrest in Canada for his alleged involvement in a scheme that stole about $1.5 million from Canadian banks. Before Canadian authorities could prosecute him, U.S. officials filed an extradition request to bring him to the States, where he was in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service for more than a year.

But after a sentencing hearing scheduled for 2009 was canceled, Tenenbaum’s case seemed to languish with little activity, until a notice about a new sentencing hearing scheduled for last November appeared in the federal court system, and U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman formally filed his sentencing order this week.

It’s not clear how long Tenenbaum was in custody after he was extradited. The U.S. Marshal Service told Threat Level in August 2010 that he’d been released on bond in March of that year, after Tenenbaum had agreed to plead guilty on the access device charge. The sequence of events, the lengthy time that the case remained inactive, and the quiet sentencing suggest that part of the plea agreement may have involved cooperation with authorities, something that is a condition of many plea agreements that involve hacking and bank fraud.

All that’s known about Tenenbaum’s case appeared in an extradition affidavit that U.S. prosecutors filed in 2008 with Canadian officials. According to that document, Tenenbaum hacked into two U.S. banks, a credit- and debit-card distribution company and a payment processor, in what they called a global “cash-out” conspiracy. Authorities said the scheme resulted in at least $10 million in losses and were part of a larger international conspiracy to hack financial institutions in the United States and abroad.

Tenenbaum was charged in the U.S. with one count of conspiracy to commit access-device fraud and one count of access-device fraud, but the conspiracy charge was later dropped. He pleaded guilty in 2009 to the access-device charge.

Tenenbaum made headlines a decade ago under his hacker handle “The Analyzer,” when he was arrested in 1998 at the age of 19, along with several other Israelis and two California teens in one of the first high-profile hacker cases, dubbed Operation Solar Sunrise, that made international news.

The teens were accused of penetrating Pentagon computers and other networks. Israel’s then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Tenenbaum “damn good” after learning of his deeds, but also “very dangerous, too.”

Israeli law enforcement opted to prosecute Tenenbaum instead of extraditing him to the U.S. to face charges. He was eventually sentenced in 2001 to six months of community service in Israel. By then, he was working as a computer-security consultant.

At the time of his arrest in Canada in 2008, Tenenbaum had been living in France, and had only been in Canada about five months on a six-month visitor’s permit when police in Calgary arrested him. He and three alleged accomplices were charged with hacking into Direct Cash Management, a Calgary company that distributes prepaid debit and credit cards. A Canadian court set bail at CN$30,000 ($27,600), but before Tenenbaum could be released from jail in Canada, U.S. authorities swooped in with a provisional warrant to retain him in custody while they pursued an indictment and extradition.

“I think he’s probably been getting away with stuff for 10 years,” Darren Hafner, an acting detective with the Calgary police, said at the time. “We haven’t seen or heard from him since the Pentagon attack. But these guys tend to get this ‘cops can’t touch me attitude’ and then they get sloppy like any criminal in any type of crime.”

According to an affidavit filed by U.S. authorities in Canada, the U.S. Secret Service began investigating “an international conspiracy” to hack into computer networks of U.S. financial institutions and other businesses in October 2007. As part of that investigation, agents examined network intrusions that occurred in January and February 2008 at OmniAmerican Credit Union, based in Fort Worth, Texas, and Global Cash Card of Irvine, California, a distributor of prepaid debit cards used primarily for payroll payments.

In both cases, the attacker gained access using a SQL injection attack that exploited a vulnerability in the company’s database software. The attacker grabbed credit- and debit-card numbers that were then used by thieves in several countries to withdraw more than $1 million from ATMs.

In April and May 2008, agents investigated two additional hacks at 1st Source Bank in Indiana, and at Symmetrex, a prepaid-debit-card processor based in Florida. The intruder again used SQL injection attacks, and losses added up to more than $3 million.

Investigators traced the intrusions to several servers belonging to HopOne Internet in McLean, Virginia, which turned out to be just a routing point for an attack that originated from servers at the Dutch web hosting company LeaseWeb — one of the largest hosting companies in Europe.

U.S. officials asked Dutch law-enforcement agents On April 7, 2008, to track “all computer traffic pertaining to three servers hosted by LeaseWeb” and intercept “the content of that traffic” for 30 days, according to the affidavit. The interception request was renewed for another 30 days on May 9.

Among the wiretapped traffic, authorities found communications that allegedly occurred between Tenenbaum — using the e-mail address Analyzer22@hotmail.com — and other known hackers, discussing the breaches into the four U.S. institutions, “as well as many other U.S. and foreign financial institutions.”

In one instant message chat in April 2008, Tenenbaum allegedly discussed trying to hack into Global Cash Card after system administrators at the company apparently locked him out from an initial intrusion.

“Yesterday I rechecked [Global Cash Card]. They are still blocking everything,” he allegedly wrote. “So we can’t hack them again.”

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‘DNSChanger’ Malware Could Strand Thousands When Domains Go Dark on Monday

Tens of thousands of U.S. internet users could be left in the digital dark on Monday when the FBI pulls the plug on domains related to the DNSChanger malware.

Computers belonging to an estimated 64,000 users in the United States, and an additional 200,000 users outside the United States, are still infected with the malware, despite repeated warnings in the news, e-mail messages sent by ISPs and alerts posted by Google and Facebook.

The DNSChanger malware, which infected more than half a million machines worldwide at the height of its activity, redirected a victim’s web browser to sites designated by the attackers, allowing them to earn more than $14 million in affiliate and referral fees.

In addition to redirecting the browsers of infected users, the malware also prevents infected machines from downloading operating system and antivirus security updates that could detect the malware and stop it from operating. When an infected user’s machine tries to access a software update page, a pop-up message says the site is currently unavailable.

Last November, federal authorities charged seven Eastern European men with running the clickjacking operation. The FBI also seized control of about 100 of the attackers’ command-and-control servers used in the operation.

But before shuttering the domains, agents realized that infected machines would not be able to browse the internet, since their web requests would go to dead addresses that once hosted the seized servers. So the FBI obtained a court order allowing the agency to contract with the Internet Systems Consortium, a private firm, to install two servers to handle requests from infected machines, so that browsers would be re-directed to the proper sites until users had a chance to delete the malware from their machines. The ISC was also allowed to collect IP addresses that contacted its replacement servers in order to allow authorities to notify the owners of the machines or their ISPs that their machines were infected.

But the FBI intends to pull the plug on ICS’s replacement servers on July 9, meaning that anyone whose machine is still infected with the malware will have trouble reaching websites they want to visit.

About 58 of the Fortune 500 companies and two government agencies are among those that own at least one computer or router that is still infected with DNS Changer, according to Internet Identity.

The DNSChanger Working group has set up a website to allow users to determine if their machines are infected. Anyone who visits the site and sees a green background on the graphic displayed at the site is not infected with the malware. Those that are infected will see a red background. The group has published a FAQ for those who find that their machine may be infected.

The clickjacking scheme began in 2007 and involved six Estonians and one Russian who allegedly used multiple front companies to operate the scam, which included a bogus internet advertising agency, according to court documents.

The bogus agency contracted with online advertisers who would pay a small commission to the suspects each time users clicked on their ads, or landed on their website.

To optimize the payback opportunities, the suspects then infected computers with the DNSChanger malware to ensure that users would visit the sites of their online advertising partners. The malware altered the DNS server settings on infected machines to direct victims’ browsers to sites that paid a fee to the defendants.

For example, if an infected user searching for Apple’s iTunes store clicked on a link to the Apple store, their browser would be directed instead to www.idownload-store-music.com, a site purporting to sell Apple software. Users trying to access the government’s Internal Revenue Service site were redirected to a website for H & R Block, a top tax preparation business in the United States.

Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorow, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin Poltev and Anton Ivanov of Estonia and Andrey Taame of Russia have been charged with 27 counts of wire fraud and other computer-related crimes in connection with the scheme.

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European Parliament Kills Global Anti-Piracy Accord ACTA

European Parliament members applaud Wednesday’s vote defeating ACTA. Photo: European Parliament

The European Parliament on Wednesday declared its independence from a controversial global anti-piracy accord, rejecting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The vote, 478-39, means the deal won’t come into effect in European Union-member nations, and effectively means ACTA is dead.

Its fate was also uncertain in the United States. Despite the Obama administration signing its intent to honor the deal last year, there was a looming constitutional showdown on whether Congress, not the administration, held the power to sign on to ACTA.

Overall, not a single nation has ratified ACTA, although Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea last year signed their intent to do so. The European Union, Mexico and Switzerland, the only other governments participating in ACTA’s creation, had not signed their intent to honor the plan.

More than three years in the making and open for signing until May 2013, ACTA exports on participating nations an intellectual-property enforcement regime resembling the one in the United States.

Among other things, the accord demands governments make it unlawful to market devices that circumvent encryption, such as devices that copy encrypted DVDs without authorization. That is akin to a feature in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States, where the law has been used by Hollywood studios to block RealNetworks from marketing DVD-copying technology.

ACTA, which the Obama administration maintains does not require Congressional approval, also calls on participating nations to maintain extensive seizure and forfeiture laws when it comes to counterfeited goods that are trademarked or copyrighted. Most important, countries must carry out a legal system where victims of intellectual property theft may be awarded an undefined amount of monetary damages.

In the United States, for example, the Copyright Act allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. A Boston jury has dinged a college student $675,000 for pilfering 30 tracks on Kazaa, while a Minnesota jury has awarded the Recording Industry Association of America $1.5 million for the purloining of 24 songs online.

A U.S.-backed footnote removed from the document more than a year ago provided for “the termination” of internet accounts for online infringers.

Until European Union authorities began leaking the documents text more than a year ago, the Obama administration was claiming the accord was a “national security” secret.

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Defunct Copyright Troll Seeks Resurrection

Photo: Doug Wildman/Flickr

Copyright troll Righthaven, which famously went defunct last year after an epic failure in trying to make money for newspapers by suing sites that reposted even parts of news stories, is seeking a second life.

Righthaven’s former chief executive wants a judge to resurrect the firm in order to appeal a court decision that found it was not infringement for an individual, who had no profit motive, to re-post an entire story online.

The copyright dispute is one of great importance in today’s digital world: whether reposting of an entire article, without permission, can amount to fair use of that work.

A Nevada federal judge ruled last year that a citizen’s re-posting of the story in an online forum was fair use in a decision that, in part, led to the unraveling of the Las Vegas-based trolling operation. Righthaven was ordered to pay legal fees and expenses in the case that amounted to more than $60,000, which the firm has refused to pay.

Without an appellate ruling affirming the fair-use decision, the opinion is not binding on other courts. Fair use is a copyright-infringement defense when a defendant reproduces a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Steve Gibson, Righthaven’s former chief executive, said if Righthaven prevails on appeal it could “return to a going concern” and satisfy its debts. But Gibson needs the court-appointed administrator of the company to allow the appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Unfortunately for Gibson, the administrator won’t authorize it, arguing that Righthaven should pay its debts — more than $200,000 — instead of litigating further.

“Attempting to prevent the appellate process from coming to full fruition is not a just goal and hardly within the realm of equitable action,” Gibson wrote (.pdf) a Nevada federal judge Monday in demanding permission. “The right of appeal is a fundamental linchpin of our democratic structure.”

Gibson added that none of Righthaven’s assets are being used to pay for the appeal.

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