Latham & Watkins offices, New York. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

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(Reuters) - Alston & Bird and Latham & Watkins are the latest major law firms to recruit lawyers with cybersecurity and privacy expertise, with both firms announcing new partner additions in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

Atlanta-based Alston has brought on former U.S. Department of Justice cyber and national security prosecutor Kellen Dwyer as co-leader of the firm's national security and digital crimes practice.

Dwyer was most recently deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's national security division overseeing its legal policy office, a position he took over last year when then-Attorney General William Barr removed his predecessor Brad Wiegmann from the role. Dwyer made headlines in 2018 when he inadvertently disclosed in a court filing that federal charges had been filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to reports.

Dwyer left private practice as a Kirkland & Ellis associate in 2014 to become an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. He prosecuted several hacking cases, including the indictment of Assange, his new firm said. Dwyer said he got started in technology litigation at Kirkland, noting his representation of Facebook Inc in litigation arising from its initial public offering.

At the Justice Department, he worked on issues including election security, encryption, cryptocurrency and cybersecurity incidents, he said.

In his move back to private practice, Dwyer said he was looking for a place where he could continue to work on "cutting-edge legal issues," including high-profile litigation and government investigations in the cybersecurity and national security arenas. At Alston, his practice will focus on data security and privacy matters, civil litigation and white-collar defense, he said.

Dwyer, who is an adjunct professor at George Mason's Scalia Law School, also noted that Alston boasts a number of former federal prosecutors in its ranks. Some of those include Byung Jin (BJay) Pak, Joseph (Jody) Hunt and Joanna Hendon.

Los Angeles-founded Latham, meanwhile, looked to a rival firm, not government, for its latest privacy and cybersecurity hire. The firm said Thursday that it's adding longtime Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe lawyer Antony (Tony) Kim, who joins as a partner in the firm's litigation and trial department and a member of its connectivity, privacy and information practice.

Kim's practice focuses on the convergence of data, technology and regulation, the 3,000-lawyer firm said. He advises clients in regulatory investigations and enforcement actions involving data breaches, privacy and consumer protection issues by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and international regulators, and counsels clients on governance, compliance and risk mitigation strategies.

Kim, in an email, said he was attracted to Latham for three reasons: "people, platform, and perspective."

"Companies are dealing with an onslaught of investigations and new regulatory requirements in every market in which they operate, and often in markets in which they dont," he said. "The regulators are extremely aggressive, and the rules are frequently changing."

An Orrick spokesperson said in an email statement, "We are grateful to Tony for all of his contributions to the firm and wish him the best."

Read More:

Ex-U.S. Attorney Byung Jin Pak lands at Atlanta's Alston & Bird

Outgoing DOJ civil division head Jody Hunt lands at Alston & Bird

Privacy and data security lawyers bask in high demand as firms play tug of war

Sara Merken reports on privacy and data security, as well as the business of law, including legal innovation and key players in the legal services industry. Reach her at sara.merken@thomsonreuters.com

See the article here:

Alston, Latham tap D.C.-based partners with cyber and privacy chops - Reuters

WASHINGTON The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of four New York Times reporters spanning nearly four months in 2017 as part of a leak investigation, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday.

It was the latest in a series of revelations about the Trump administration secretly obtaining reporters communications records in an effort to uncover their sources. Last month, the Biden Justice Department disclosed Trump-era seizures of the phone logs of reporters who work for The Washington Post and the phone and email logs for a CNN reporter.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, condemned the action by the Trump administration.

Seizing the phone records of journalists profoundly undermines press freedom, he said in a statement. It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.

Last month, after the disclosures about the seizures of communications records involving Post and CNN reporters, President Biden said he would not allow the department to take such a step during his administration, calling it simply, simply wrong.

Referring to that declaration, Mr. Baquet added: President Biden has said this sort of interference with a free press will not be tolerated in his administration. We expect the Department of Justice to explain why this action was taken and what steps are being taken to make certain it does not happen again in the future.

Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, said that law enforcement officials obtained the records in 2020, and added that members of the news media have now been notified in every instance of leak investigations from the 2019-2020 period in which their records were sought.

The department informed The Times that law enforcement officials had seized phone records from Jan. 14 to April 30, 2017, for four Times reporters: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt. The government also secured a court order to seize logs but not contents of their emails, it said, but no records were obtained.

The Justice Department did not say which article was being investigated. But the lineup of reporters and the timing suggested that the leak investigation related to classified information reported in an April 22, 2017, article the four reporters wrote about how James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential election.

Discussing Mr. Comeys unorthodox decision to announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. was recommending against charging Hillary Clinton in relation to her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state, the April 2017 article mentioned a document obtained from Russia by hackers working for Dutch intelligence officials. The document, whose existence was classified, was said to have played a key role in Mr. Comeys thinking about the Clinton case.

The document has been described as a memo or email written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far. Russian hackers had obtained the document, but it is apparently not among those that Russia sent to WikiLeaks, intelligence officials concluded.

Mr. Comey was said to be worried that if Ms. Lynch were to be the one who announced a decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton, and Russia then made the document public, it would be used to raise doubts about the independence of the investigation and the legitimacy of the outcome.

The Times reported in January 2020 that Trump-era investigators had pursued a leak investigation into whether Mr. Comey had been the source of the unauthorized disclosure in that 2017 article.

Mr. Comey had been under scrutiny since 2017, after Mr. Trump fired him as the director of the F.B.I. After his dismissal, Mr. Comey engineered through his friend Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor the disclosure to The Times of accounts of several of his conversations with the president related to the Russia investigation.

The inquiry into Mr. Comey, according to three people briefed on that investigation, was eventually code-named Arctic Haze. Its focus was said to evolve over time, as investigators shifted from scrutinizing whether they could charge Mr. Comey with a crime for disclosing his conversations with Mr. Trump, to whether he had anything to do with the disclosure of the existence of the document.

As part of that effort, law enforcement officials had seized Mr. Richmans phone and computer, according to a person familiar with the matter. They are said to have initially searched them for material about Mr. Comeys conversations with Mr. Trump, and later obtained a courts permission to search them again, apparently about the Russia document matter.

Separately, according to a person briefed on the investigation, the F.B.I. is also said to have subpoenaed Google in 2020, seeking information relevant to any emails between Mr. Richman and The Times. A spokesman for Google did not respond to a request for comment.

But by November 2020, some prosecutors felt that the F.B.I. had not found evidence that could support any charges against Mr. Comey, and they discussed whether the investigation should be closed.

At the beginning of this year, prosecutors were informed that the F.B.I. was not willing to close the case in part because agents still wanted to interview Mr. Comey, according to a person familiar with the F.B.I.s inquiry. Interviewing the subject of an investigation is typically considered a final step before closing a matter or bringing charges.

Last month, the F.B.I. asked Mr. Comeys lawyer whether he would be willing to sit down for an interview, a request that Mr. Comey declined, according to a person familiar with the case.

Starting midway through the George W. Bush administration, and extending through the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, the Justice Department became more aggressive about pursuing criminal leak investigations.

Mr. Lichtblau who is no longer with The Times came under scrutiny early in that period because he co-wrote a 2005 Times article disclosing the warrantless surveillance program that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Bush administration convened a special task force to hunt for the sources of that article, and its new approach spilled over into unrelated cases during the Obama administration.

In 2013, Mr. Apuzzo and Mr. Goldman who were then working for The Associated Press and had broken news about a bomb plot by a Qaeda affiliate in Yemen were notified that the Obama-era department had secretly subpoenaed two months of their phone records, along with those of other reporters and editors at The A.P.

That same month, it also emerged that in a leak investigation about a Fox News article involving North Koreas nuclear program, the Obama Justice Department had used a search warrant to obtain a Fox News reporters emails and characterized the reporter as a criminal conspirator.

The disclosures prompted a bipartisan uproar, and Mr. Obama instructed the attorney general at the time, Eric H. Holder Jr., to review rules for criminal investigations that affect the news media.

Mr. Holder tightened them, including strengthening a preference for notifying a news organization in advance about a planned subpoena so it could negotiate or fight in court over its scope. After the changes, the rate of new leak cases dropped significantly during Mr. Obamas second term.

But under Mr. Trump, who liked to attack the news media as the enemy of the people, the practice resurged.

In August 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the number of leak inquiries had tripled. And under his successor, Attorney General William P. Barr, it is now clear, the department further escalated its aggressive approach to leak investigations.

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Trump Administration Secretly Seized Phone Records of Times Reporters - The New York Times

Wed, May 19, 2021

IranSourcebyKenan Rahmani and Cameron Khansarinia

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad meets with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released on May 12, 2021. SANA/Handout via REUTERS

The leaked audiotape of Islamic Republic Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has elicited much fanfare in recent weeks. Among the less scrutinized aspects of the tape has been Zarifs reference to the Islamic Republics ongoing support of the Bashar al-Assad regime, including the fact that Iran Airthe flag carrier of the countrycontinues to transport arms and fighters into the Syrian conflict. As the Joe Biden administration negotiates a potential return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in Vienna, Tehrans backing of the Assad regime should not be left off the table.

Proponents of an unqualified return by President Biden to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have frequently argued that doing so is necessary to prevent conflict and even war in the Middle East. As the administration has slow-played any such moves in recent months, analysts who have long warned of an impending war with Iran that has never come are once again sounding the alarm bells and urging Biden to return to the JCPOA immediately to prevent war. Yet in Irans thirty-fifth province, as those close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei refer to Syria, a return to the deal wouldnt prevent war, it would escalate and expand one that has now been raging violently for a decade.

The sanctions reimposed on the Islamic Republic after the US withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 by the Donald Trump administration have, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund, caused Irans foreign reserves to dwindle to as low as $4 billionlimiting the regimes funding for its war machine. But international estimates have indicated that, if the Biden administration were to ease sanctions, Tehrans foreign reserves would swell to more than $100 billion, rapidly enriching an actor that has shown no hesitation to arm and fund the regions worst elements. In a recent United Nations Security Council briefing on the Syrian conflict, Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked that [W]e have to find a way to do something to take action [in Syria]That is our responsibility, and shame on us if we dont meet it. By cutting off the spigot flooding the Syrian regimes coffers and military, the secretary of state can meet that responsibility.

On the decade anniversary of the conflict in Syria, which the UN Secretary General Antnio Guterres called the most dramatic humanitarian crisis the world has faced, the war has already taken five hundred thousand lives and forced seven million refugees to flee the country. The atrocities committed against the Syrian people and the regional instability that has followed are not accidents. They are fundamental components of the Islamic Republics strategy of undermining the Middle East, whether by funding terror groups or propping up dictators. Indeed, when Syrian Prime Minister Riyad Hijab defected to the opposition in 2012, he remarked, The person who runs the country is not Bashar al-Assad but [Quds Force Commander] Qasem Soleimani. While Soleimani is no more, the Islamic Republic continues to fund and direct the war against the Syrian people.

The investment is not insignificant. Experts place the Islamic Republics annual support for Assads war at $15 billion per year. The support to Assads regime is not only financial. Tehran-backed Shia militias comprise nearly 80 percent of Syrias ground forces. Such proxiesincluding Lebanese Hezbollah, the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Brigades, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Asaib ahl Al-Haqwere the main ground forces besieging rebel-held cities and towns of Eastern Ghouta, Zabadani, Madaya, and Aleppo. All told, Tehran recruited an estimated eighty thousand militia fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and beyond to fight a holy war in Syria.

Though some promoted the Islamic Republics involvement in Syria as defense against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the use of starvation as a weapon of war and preventing medicine and basic necessities from reaching civilians were among Irans primary tactics. Dozens of children starved to death and hundreds more died due to lack of medicine, leading UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to declare in 2016 that the use of starvation as a weapon of war is a war crime.

Syrian activists have long urged the international community to take further action on the Islamic Republics crimes in the country, including investigating its campaign of wide-scale ethnic cleansing of Sunni villages. Indeed, the Barack Obama administration sanctioned Irans intelligence ministry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps notorious Quds Force, including its former commander Soleimani, for supporting the Syrian regime as it continues to commit human rights abuses against the people of Syria.

Despite the insistence by some Western journalists that the selection of so-called moderates in Iran would reform the regimes regional posture, the crimes against humanity have continued. Since 2013, the Islamic Republic has sent up to twenty thousand Afghan refugees to fight in Syria, including hundreds of child soldiers as young as fourteen years old. Tehrans practice of using children to fight on its behalf, a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, has been described by Human Rights Watch as a war crime. Its only one of many.

According to a cable released by WikiLeaks in 2012, German officials reported that the Islamic Republic aided Assad regimes chemical weapons program, which included the construction design and equipment to annually produce tens to hundreds of tons of precursors for VX, sarin, and mustard. In addition to supporting the production of internationally-banned weapons, Tehran also provided technology for deploying weapons, including the Falaq-2 330mm rocket launcher used in the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, which killed hundreds of children.

Assads crimes in Syria, with the aiding and abetting of the Islamic Republic, have torn the country apart and left it nearly unrecognizable. The ripple effects of the Syrian crisis are felt in refugee camps across southern Europe and the resulting rightwing nationalism wreaking havoc on democracies across the continent. The Islamic Republics policy of sowing chaos has succeeded.

US sanctions on Iran, however, have proven to be effective in controlling some of the activities of terrorist groups under the command of the Islamic Republic. Hezbollah, for example, has admitted the impact and has been forced to request support from the Lebanese public for its ongoing terrorist operations. This includes Syria, where regime-backed militias reported that Tehran could no longer afford their salaries. These troubles, in addition to the regimes aforementioned balance of payments crisis and its dire economic situation, leaves the Islamic Republic in a truly desperate position. It is one the US should use to force concessions on the regimes war machine in Syria.

These facts are seemingly not lost on the new American administration. Secretary Blinken has admitted that the Obama administrations policies in the Middle East failed to prevent a horrific loss of life. Now, with a second opportunity to prevent further bloodshed, if President Biden and his team truly want to prevent war, a spiral in the Middle East, and the further expansion of an emboldened Russia who forced Iran to send ground forces to Syria according to the leaked Zarif tape, they must not empower a belligerent Tehran to wage an even bloodier war. Reentering the JCPOA would do just that.

If the Islamic Republic is looking for sanctions relief, the Biden administration should demand that it extract all militia personnel, end support for the Assad regimes military operations, and cease cooperation on weapons developmentincluding chemical weapons. If the Islamic Republic is unwilling to take these most fundamental, humanitarian steps, it cannot and should not be trusted with the tens of billions of dollars that sanctions relief will provide.

The necessity of controlling Tehrans expansionist aims in the Middle East is not a partisan one. In March, more than one hundred members of Congress from both parties urged the Biden administration to use its leverage to pressure the regime that has sowed chaos in Syria. The Islamic Republic, flush with cash unfrozen by sanctions relief, will not tend to the needs of its citizens. It will sow further chaos.

If the US returns to the JCPOA without extracting concessions from the regime, specifically on its murderous campaign in Syria, the death toll will only continue to grow. If there is a war to be stopped, it is the war the Islamic Republic is already waging in Syria on behalf of Assad. Focusing only on the nuclear threat alone will not prevent warit will fund it.

Kenan Rahmani is senior policy advisor at Americans for a Free Syria (AFS) and senior advocacy advisor at The Syria Campaign. Follow him on Twitter @KenanRahmani.

Cameron Khansarinia is policy director of the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI). Follow him on Twitter @khansarinia.

Tue, May 18, 2021

Since the beginning of 2018, Iran has been directly involved in the battle against ISIS in eastern Syria. Through its participation, Iran has been able to carry out its expansion project specifically in Deir ez-Zor, a province bordering Iraq that is troubled by a fragile security situation.

MENASourcebyNavvar Saban

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Iran sanctions relief will continue funding the ongoing war in Syria - Atlantic Council

Who should have the right to a platform, and who should make decisions about what expression is allowed online? These conversations are nearly as old as the internet itself.

Among the earliest instances of civil society collaboration with social media occurred in 2007 when Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas lost his YouTube account for posting videos depicting police brutality in his country. By removing the content, YouTube a subsidiary of Google was simply enforcing its own rules, but the story nevertheless made international headlines.

Back then, YouTubes rules were pithy and light. Respect the YouTube community, they began. Were not asking for the kind of respect reserved for nuns, the elderly, and brain surgeons. We mean dont abuse the site. Regarding graphic violence, however, they were fairly clear: Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked or humiliated, dont post it.

Abbas reached out to friends at influential groups around the world, as well as the US Embassy, according to a cable leaked by WikiLeaks. The cable details the videos contents and ends with a request that the State Department contact Google to try to resolve the matter. Whether the US government or civil society activists reached Google first is unknown, but Abbass account was quickly restored.

Content moderation was a nascent field at the time, but over the years it has grown to a multi-billion-dollar industry. With that growth have come changes some positive, others not so much. In the years following Abbass experience, most major tech companies began issuing transparency reports regular reports that show how they respond to government demands for user data and content removal. This initiative came after a push from civil society, one that continues today. But theres still much more they could be doing.

The Santa Clara Principles were created by a coalition of civil society and academic partners in 2018 to set baseline standards for transparency and accountability. The principles supported by more than 100 institutions around the world are simple: they demand that companies publish numbers about posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their content guidelines; provide detailed notice to users when their content is removed or their account suspended; and, perhaps most importantly, ensure that every user has the right to remedy the chance to appeal to a human being when a potentially erroneous decision is made.

A year after their release, the principles were endorsed by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snap, Apple, Github, Instagram and a handful of other companies, but only one Reddit has actually implemented them in full. (Disclosure: Reddit is an independent subsidiary of Cond Nasts parent company, Advance Publications.) In fact, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, much of the progress that had been made in recent years in terms of providing appeals to users has backslid, as commercial content moderators working in countries like the Philippines have been sent home, unable to do their jobs because of (valid) concerns about privacy and mental well-being.

Automation has been touted as the next big thing in content moderation. But although this could alleviate some of the problems that face human moderators most notably, the horrific content that these workers have to look at on a daily basis it is not particularly good at detecting nuance, leading to all sorts of mistakes. Mistakes that threaten the ability of users around the world to express themselves.

The rules that social media companies put in place to maintain user safety are sometimes necessary, and sometimes absurd (think the banning of womens bodies or Facebooks requirement of authentic names). But it is imperative that these rules be enforced fairly and evenly, and that when mistakes are inevitably made, users are able to seek justice.

The Santa Clara Principles are just a starting point: if Silicon Valleys tech giants have any interest in contributing to a just world, there is more to be done. We must diversify the boardrooms and root out existing biases. Rules, many of which were put in place more than a decade ago, should be audited and updated for the 21st century. And key voices, not just from the US but from around the world and particularly the global south, need to be brought into the policymaking process. A more equitable internet is possible.

Originally posted here:

Social media companies say they want to be transparent. So why arent they? - Wired.co.uk

The DarkSide hacker gang that is responsible for the devastating Colonial Pipeline attack this weekend is a relatively new group, but cybersecurity analysts already know enough about them to determine just how dangerous they are.

According to Boston-based Cybereason, DarkSide is an organized group of hackers set up along the "ransomware as a service" business model, meaning the DarkSide hackers develop and market ransomware hacking tools, and sell them to other criminals who then carry out attacks. Think of it as the evil twin of a Silicon Valley software start-up.

Bloomberg first reported that DarkSide may be involved in the attack on Colonial Pipeline. The FBI confirmed Monday that DarkSide was behind the attack.

On Monday, Cybereason provided CNBC with a new statement from DarkSide's website that appears to address the Colonial Pipeline shutdown.

Under a heading, "About the latest news," DarkSide claimed it's not political and only wants to make money without causing problems for society.

"We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for our motives," the statement said. "Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society. From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future."

Cybereason reports that DarkSide has a perverse desire to appear ethical, even posting its own code of conduct for its customers telling them who and what targets are acceptable to attack. Protected organizations not to be harmed include hospitals, hospices, schools, universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Also apparently protected are entities based in former Soviet countries. Fair game, then, are all for-profit companies in English speaking countries.

DarkSide also maintains that it will donate a portion of its profits to charities, although some of the charities have turned down the contributions.

"No matter how bad you think our work is, we are pleased to know that we helped change someone's life," the hackers wrote. "Today we sended [sic] the first donations."

Cybereason found that the group is highly professional, offering a help desk and call in phone number for victims, and has already published confidential data on more than 40 victims. It maintains a website called "DarkSide Leaks" that's modeled on WikiLeaks where the hackers post the private data of companies that they've stolen.

They conduct "double extortion," which means the hackers not only encrypt and lock up the victim's data, but they also steal data and threaten to make it public on the DarkSide Leaks site if companies don't pay ransom.

Typical ransom demands range from $200,000 to $20 million, and Cybereason says the hackers gathered detailed intelligence on their victims, learning the size and scope of the company as well as who the key decision-makers are inside the firm.

The hackers continue to expand: Cybereason reports they recently released a new version of their malware: DarkSide 2.0.

Read the original:

Here's the hacking group responsible for the Colonial Pipeline shutdown - CNBC

Another err?

In her ruling Baraitser concluded: The defence has not established that Mr. Assange has been the target of a politically motivated prosecution. In other words, her interpretation of politically was not about Assange and his motivations but the US prosecution. That can easily be challenged, as observed in a May 2019 article in The Canary.

For example, CIA chief Mike Pompeo described WikiLeaks as a hostile intelligence service. There have also been numerous threats (including death threats) against Assange from the US, including by senior politicians:

And theres this:

But theres yet another political dimension.

Last year 154 lawyers sent a letter to prime minister Boris Johnson, the lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice Robert Buckland QC, the secretary of state for foreign affairs Dominic Raab, and home secretary Priti Patel, pointing out that:

Charges 1-17 [raised against Assange] are brought under the Espionage Act 1917, which, in name alone, reveals the political and antiquated nature of the charges.

The letter added:

The UK-US Extradition Treaty, which provides the very basis of the extradition request, specifically prohibits extradition for political offences in Art. 4(1).

And that:

there is broad international consensus that political offences should not be the basis of extradition.[ix] This is reflected in Art. 3 of the 1957 European Convention on Extradition, Art. 3 ECHR, Art. 3(a) of the UN Model Treaty on Extradition, the Interpol Constitution and every bilateral treaty ratified by the US for over a century.

On 8 February, 24 rights organisations including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch appealed to the US acting attorney-general to end the prosecution of Assange, saying:

It is unfortunately the case that press freedom is under threat globally. Now more than ever, it is Pentagon Papers case memorably called a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous pressin the United States and abroad. With this end in mind, we respectfully urge you to forgo the appeal of Judge Baraitsers ruling, and to dismiss the indictment of Mr. Assange.

Meanwhile, given Davis comments, a counter-claim by the defence to a higher court arguing that Baraitser has erred in law could see the prosecution case falter, if not collapse.

Read more from the original source:
Setback for Assange prosecution appeal after intervention by former government minister - The Canary

Journalism is facing unprecedented assaults from attempts at censorship and the proliferation of fake news around the world. To push back against these threats, blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications are being developed to help authenticate media content, preserve records and maintain journalism integrity.

From Rappler CEO Maria Ressas persecution and conviction in the Philippines for cyber libel, to the arrests of reporters and media tycoons in Hong Kong, to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange potentially being extradited to the U.S. where he could face over 100 years in prison, media watchers say the outlook for press freedom is bleak.

Journalistic institutions working independently without interference from state actors or foreign actors is in peril in some countries, more so than in others, Bernat Ivancsics, a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told Forkast.News.

What we see in extreme cases, like in the Philippines, in Hong Kong, mainland China, currently in Belarus and Eastern Europe, Brazil, etc. that type of phenomenon is creeping into Western and developed nations, Ivancsics said.

The Trump administrations decision to prosecute Assange in 2019 for allegedly violating the Espionage Act also set the tone for the deteriorating state of freedom of the press around the world. The charge comes as a result of Wikileaks publication of classified U.S. military documents known as collateral murder showing two Reuters journalists and Iraqis killed by gunfire from an American helicopter in 2007. The U.S. Justice Department has pledged to appeal a British judges recent rejection of their request for Assanges extradition to the U.S.

Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations, said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLUs) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project in a statement. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the publics interest.

BREAKING: For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment. https://t.co/RJxjFPfkHe

Ivancsics agreed that Assanges prosecution would very likely set a dangerous precedent in journalism. There is a silence, especially in British and American press, on what the Assange decision would entail is kind of worrisome, he said. I certainly do not see the amount of discourse or just anxiety that it should invoke in current journalists.

With attacks on the press from a variety of directions from both state actors and the private sector what role can blockchain play to ensure a better playing field for journalism? Forkast.News explores ways in which blockchain has been experimented with by media companies and how the technology could be used by journalists and readers in the future.

A number of journalism organizations are now experimenting with blockchain.

The New York Times News Provenance Project was one, which created a proof-of-concept of how images could be authenticated and recorded as authentic on blockchain to prevent the spread of doctored images.

The project simulated a social media platform where users would be able to quickly check if a photo on the site was modified by providing a transparent record of any changes and usages of images on the site.

See related article: Journalist Maria Ressas ordeal shines light on social medias dark side

According to Ivancsics, who worked on the New York Times project, the real threat in journalism is the prevalence of images and memes that are cheaply made and easily shared on social media that distort the truth of events in the news.

Its just a sheer obfuscation of whats going on and what is true, what is not true, what the mainstream media is hiding, he said. Those sorts of questions are going to be the ones that are really going to just mess with peoples minds and perceptions around political and cultural issues.

The Times concluded that the prototype did help make informed judgements about the authenticity of photos on social media, but more work is needed to make it easily accessible to users.

In order for a blockchain solution to become a reality, news organizations with varying financial and technical resources need to be able to participate, said the Times report on the project. Finding ways to lower the barriers to entry is an essential component of any future explorations.

1/5 Today, the News Provenance Project is sharing insights from the UX research it has done to find out if surfacing metadata on news photos would help people to better discern credible images from misinformation. An overview of what we learned https://t.co/08SFMyoiSe

Another project was Civil, which was an attempt to change financing in journalism through the use of cryptocurrency tokens, but which shut down operations in 2020 due to similar issues with accessibility.

Civil had the potential to revolutionize how journalism is funded, created, and distributed in a secure, verifiable, quality manner, said Jonathan Askin, a professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School, said in an interview with Forkast.News.

However, Civils use of blockchain technology was not smooth enough, widely adopted, or well enough understood to enable journalists and readers to use the platform to its full potential. One guide from the Nieman Journalism Lab outlined the 44-step process needed to buy Civil tokens, highlighting the complexities of becoming a participant.

We will learn from these early experiments and create more viable blockchain-based content funding, creation, and distribution platforms, largely free from the oversight of the media moguls, Askin said.

More work remains to be done to achieve those goals, particularly for the use of blockchains features as a decentralized, immutable store of information as a tool against censorship.

Blockchain usage for information security in terms of information dissemination and decentralized information dissemination hasnt really been explored, Ivancsics said. At least in the U.S. and certain Western European countries, I dont really see the incentive right now to explore this type of blockchain usage.

While the economic or political incentives may not be in place to explore the usage of blockchain or DLT chiefly as a way to deter censorship, the technologys application in journalism is still valid according to experts.

The immutability, and decentralized, redundant verifiability of blockchain-enabled networks and processes makes it well suited to prevent censorship, Askin said. No central, biased arbiters are positioned to mutate content without verification by the network.

The fact that we can now trace the provenance and flow of data, content, and information from creation to mutation through perpetual distribution makes it much easier for viewers to access and verify the authenticity and likely truth of the content, added Askin, who is also the founder and director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, which focuses on tech-related media and policy issues.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is an example of a company using a combination of distributed ledgers, blockchain and cryptocurrency to store data and content such as articles securely in a decentralized fashion.

IPFS project lead Molly Mackinlay told Forkast.News that the company assists media with content addressing, meaning that users are able to view exact copies of articles independently of where they are hosted or published. This allows users to canonically reference and self-host a specific snapshot of an article, even if its later modified or deleted by the original provider.

Being able to fetch content by what it is means that anyone can host the data youre looking for decreasing the dependence on single, central news sources which might be censored if a group is trying to restrict access to information, Mackinlay said.

IPFS has been used to help document data that might be politically at-risk for later analysis and accountability. For example, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative used IPFS to document climate change data during the 2016 U.S. election to ensure it was preserved despite USAID funding cuts.

This helps decouple data creation from data preservation, even if one party wants the data to be removed or destroyed, other organizations who find it valuable can preserve it, link to it, and keep using it, Mackinlay said.

However, neither IPFS nor its decentralized storage network affiliate Filecoin incentivize spreading information to parties that arent trying to find it, and users pay to maintain content on their networks.

Matters.news is one Chinese-language media company that is cryptocurrency driven and hosts content on IPFS nodes, and platforms such as STEEM, LikeCoin, DTube and Hive also fit in similar categories related to cryptocurrency and decentralized content creation.

The use of blockchain and distributed ledgers to maintain a transparent and public record of media may be the most immediate use of the technology, particularly as rumors and actual fake news proliferate on social media, and the impact of Covid-19 continues to shape global geopolitics and economics.

How do you prove or disprove if something is the authentic material or know it is not being censored? Jim Nasr, CEO of blockchain application developer Acoer, told Forkast.News.

Blockchain technology applied in ways similar to the News Provenance Project or Adobes Content Authenticity Initiative may provide the answer. We can timestamp [content], we can have non-intrusive ways to show the authentic content and its attribution to whoever created it, versus any of the alternatives, Nasr said.

Forkast.News is collaborating with Acoer to leverage NewsHashs authenticity tracking service. Readers can scan the QR code below to verify on Hedera Hashgraphs DLT whether this article or video is authentic.

Acoer has developed a pilot system for journalism that aims to do just that a news tracker that logs and stamps article hashes into the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger DLT to combat fake news. Users curious to check if an article is authentic could scan a QR code on the Newshash.io site to ensure the article and its contents are valid.

Chicago-based social enterprise Hala Systems is another example of a company using Hedera Hashgraph to provide journalists and civilians with an immutable digital record of events occurring in war-torn Syria, where disinformation campaigns have distorted public perceptions. Information gathered on the platform can be used to verify the authenticity of events that transpire as well as provide an early warning system to prevent civilian casualties from incoming air strikes.

A combination of decentralized content hosting and blockchain-enabled authentication could be a solution to the issue of fake news and censorship.

Certainly the infrastructure of a blockchain can help with that, particularly if you have not just a proof of it, but the content itself decentralized and distributed over many nodes, Nasr said.

Another potential application may involve using natural language processing algorithms to gauge the veracity of the content in articles and to stamp and store that information through DLT or blockchain in a way that readers can easily check the accuracy of statements.

A combination of these technologies could provide a reliability score for readers to help readers judge whether articles are trustworthy. This proposed system would require a consortium of vetted journalists working together over time to use the rating system, over time creating a large record of content and authors as well as their confidence scores through a network effect.

From a consumer perspective, if Jim is reading [a journalists] article with a 79% trust or confidence score, that intimates the algorithm basically looking at different sources, this triangulation in real time and saying theres a high degree of confidence that this is legit, Nasr said.

The same system could also be applied to find out if an article was censored, or to what degree one article is omitting information relevant to the reader compared to other articles.

While blockchain as applied to journalism is still in its experimental phase, experts agree that it does have the potential to assist the flow of information and to mitigate the spread of disinformation.

I like to think that blockchain will become a great democratizing tool to allow worthy ideas to reach broader audiences and advance global public discourse on ideas that affect all of society and the planet, Askin said.

When the technology and user interfaces become more user-friendly and idiot proof, well see broader adoption of blockchain-based journalism.

Forkast.News is collaborating with Acoer to leverage NewsHashs authenticity tracking service. Readers can scan a QR code to verify on Hedera Hashgraphs DLT whether this article or video is authentic. Read here to find out more.

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Can blockchain prevent fake news and protect against censorship? - Forkast News

The US government has appealed a UK judges ruling against the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, according to a justice department official.

The appeal made clear that Joe Biden intends to have Assange stand trial on espionage- and hacking-related charges over WikiLeaks publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents.

The justice department had until Friday to file an appeal against the ruling on 4 January that Assange suffered mental health problems that would raise the risk of suicide were he extradited to the US for trial.

Yes, we filed an appeal and we are continuing to pursue extradition, a justice department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, told AFP.

Human rights groups had called on Biden to drop the case, which raises sensitive transparency and media freedom issues.

After WikiLeaks began publishing US secrets in 2009, the Obama administration in which Biden was vice-president declined to pursue the case. Assange said WikiLeaks was no different than other media outlets constitutionally protected to publish such materials.

Prosecuting him could mean also prosecuting powerful US news organisations for publishing similar material legal fights the government would probably lose.

But under Donald Trump, whose 2016 election was helped by WikiLeaks publishing Russian-stolen materials damaging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the justice department built a national security case against Assange.

In 2019, Assange, an Australian national, was charged under the US Espionage Act and computer crimes laws on multiple counts of conspiring with and directing others, from 2009 to 2019, to illegally obtain and release US secrets.

In doing so he aided and abetted hacking, illegally exposed confidential US sources to danger and used the information to damage the US, according to the charges. If convicted on all counts, the 49-year-old faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years.

John Demers, an assistant attorney general, said at the time: Julian Assange is no journalist.

Assange has remained under detention by UK authorities pending the appeal.

This week 24 organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and Reporters Without Borders, urged Biden to drop the case.

Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret, they said in an open letter. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.

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US government appeals UK ruling against Julian Assange's extradition - The Guardian

Norwegian bank DNB AS A said Friday that an investigation into its alleged involvement in handling payments from an Icelandic fishing company embroiled in a bribery probe has been dismissed.

The Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime, known as Okokrim, launched a probe in November 2019 following a WikiLeaks data dump and subsequent allegations made in Icelandic media.

DNB said in a statement Friday that it had been informed that the investigation hasnt generated any information that gives grounds for criminal prosecution of individuals and the public prosecutor isnt of the view that a corporate penalty is applicable in this case. The case has therefore been dismissed, DNB said.

WikiLeaks published over 30,000 documents it called the Fishrot Files, which suggested that Icelandic fishing group Samherji hf had for years paid millions of dollars in bribes to Namibian officials for fishing quotas in the countrys waters.

Icelandic media then claimed that Samherji used DNB to funnel over $70 million to a shell company in the Marshall Islands, made up partially of proceeds from its Namibian activities.

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DNB Says Authorities Have Ended Probe Into Money-Laundering Allegations - The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Bidens administration plans to continue to seek to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States to face hacking conspiracy charges, the U.S. Justice Department said.

FILE PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes a speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy, in central London, Britain February 5, 2016. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo

Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi on Tuesday said the U.S. government will continue to challenge a British judges ruling last month that Assange should not be extradited to the United States because of the risk he would commit suicide.

In a Jan. 4 ruling, the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, said, I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.

The British judge set Friday as a deadline for the United States to appeal her ruling forbidding Assanges extradition.

Raimondi said the United States will challenge Baraitsers ruling. We continue to seek his extradition.

WikiLeaks drew fury from the U.S. government after publishing thousands of pages of once-secret reports and documents generated by American military and intelligence agencies, including detailed descriptions of CIA hacking capabilities. WikiLeaks also published emails hacked from Democrat Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign and a key adviser, which Clinton and some of her supporters say was a factor in her election defeat to Republican Donald Trump.

Debate over possible American moves to seek Assanges extradition from Britain first arose nearly a decade ago when Barack Obama served as president and Joe Biden as his vice president.

Obamas Justice Department decided not to seek Assanges extradition on the grounds that what Assange and WikiLeaks did was too similar to journalistic activities protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Trump administration officials stepped up public criticism of Assange and WikiLeaks only weeks after taking office in January 2017 and subsequently filed a series of increasingly harsh criminal charges accusing Assange of participating in a hacking conspiracy.

Assange supporters have been pressing the Biden administration to drop charges against him during Bidens first 100 days in the White House.

Reporting By Mark Hosenball; editing by Jonathan Oatis

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Biden administration plans to continue to seek extradition of WikiLeaks' Assange: official - Reuters