Angry China rejects blame for Gmail attack

© AFP/File Li Xin

AFP

BEIJING (AFP) -   China said Thursday it was "unacceptable" to blame it for a cyberspying campaign which Google said had targeted the Gmail accounts of senior US officials, journalists and Chinese activists.

The comments marked the latest salvo in a battle between the Chinese government and Google dating back to last year when the US Internet giant revealed it had been the victim of a separate China-based cyberattack.

"To put all of the blame on China is unacceptable," foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters.

Obama Proposes Harsh New Copyright Laws for Internet

Do Obama's Proposed New Copyright Laws Go Too Far? (Part I)

Obama Administration IP Czar Victoria Espinel

David Makarewicz, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

On Tuesday, the White House's Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel, provided Congress with a White Paper (available for download here), outlining a series of the Obama Administration's recommended legislative changes to combat online piracy and counterfeiting.  Significantly, the recommendations include making it a felony offense to stream infringing content and giving Federal agencies wiretapping authority to obtain evidence of criminal copyright and trademark offenses.

US cites Baidu, PirateBay, others in copyright piracy

Baidu is the 6th most trafficked website in the world
© AFP/File Simon Lim

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Monday named leading Chinese search engine Baidu and Swedish torrent download site Pirate Bay in a list of the world's top online and physical markets for pirated and counterfeit goods.

The US Trade Representative said the two websites, a host of others and more than 20 physical markets, like the widely known Silk Market in Beijing and Panthip Plaza in Bangkok, as "notorious" centers openly selling or enabling the sale of counterfeit or pirated goods, from software to industrial products to live sports television broadcasts.

While no action was threatened in the USTR's first global "Review of Notorious Markets", it said the markets were targets for copyright enforcement efforts and could be included in individual country reports on enforcement efforts.


"The United States urges the responsible authorities to intensify efforts to combat piracy and counterfeiting in these and similar markets," it said.

While the markets named spanned from physical sites in South America to Southeast Asia and Internet sites in a number of countries, Chinese offenders were the most numerous on the list.

It said that Baidu, the sixth most trafficked Internet website in the world, and the leader in China, according to web surveyor Alexa Internet, was enabling piracy with "deep linking" searches.

Such searches, for instance, could take a user directly to a page for a pirated download rather than to the website's home page.

Also named were business-to-business site Taobao, sports telecast rebroadcaster TV Ants, smartphone applications host 91.com; physical markets in Yiwu, Shenzhen and Beijing; and popular computer markets like Hailong PC Mall in Beijing and Shanghai's Yangpu Yigao Digital Square.

The USTR said that Taobao had moved to curb pirated and copyright-infringing goods on its site, but "it still has a long way to go in order to resolve those problems."

A slew of BitTorrent sites -- which permit speedy downloads of large files like music, videos and books -- were named, including The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt of Canada, Russia-based Rutracker, Demenoid of the Ukraine, and Publicbt.

Russia-based social network site Vkontakte was cited for permitting users "to provide access to allegedly infringing materials."

The list of physical markets included sites in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Kiev, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Manila.

It said the entire economy of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay "is based in part on the trafficking of counterfeit and infringed goods, with a particular emphasis on electronic goods.

"This activity spills over into the entire Tri-Border Region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, creating a hotbed of piracy and counterfeiting."

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6 Threats to Free and Open Access to the Internet

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Assange Prosecution: A Brazen Effort to Kill Alternative Media

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

Now that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in custody, we can expect the U.S. government to request his extradition and prosecute the Australian for espionage. “Any such proceedings would set up a test of whether the First Amendment’s protection for a free press extends to a website with a worldwide audience,” notes McClatchy today.

In 1917 the United States enacted the Espionage Act, a law that has made it a crime to “willfully communicate” secret government information that could expose national secrets held by officialdom. Since the law was passed, however, the government has avoided prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information.



“The First Amendment’s freedom of speech and the press has protected journalists in the past, though it is not clear whether the courts would consider Assange a journalist,” writes McClatchy.

Assange’s “actions are not those of a responsible journalist that would enjoy the protection of the Constitution,” opines Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA. Government, of course, will decided what is responsible and irresponsible journalism and the high court will enshrine this in law.

The establishment – including its highest court – may eventually restrict the First Amendment and have its protection apply only to selected corporate media journalists and other propaganda functionaries of the elite.

Any such ruling by the Supreme Court will send a message to investigative journalists and alternative news organizations and publications – you will be prosecuted for revealing “government secrets,” in short it may soon be illegal to report information the government wants to keep hidden from the American people.

According to a Congressional Research Service analysis, the Supreme Court has not resolved the question of “whether, in cases where information has been acquired unlawfully by a newspaper or by a source, government may ever punish not only the unlawful acquisition, but the ensuing publication as well.”

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Government agencies restrict employee access to WikiLeaks

AFP

The White House told government agencies to take measures to prevent employees without proper authorization from accessing classified US diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks.

“The recent disclosure of US government documents by WikiLeaks has resulted in damage to our national security,” the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a message to all federal agencies obtained by AFP.

It reminded them that “each federal employee and contractor is obligated to protect classified information” and said that a public release of classified documents did not mean they had been declassified.

“Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog or on websites) do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents,” the OMB said.

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Don't Mention the Cables, Future Diplomats

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