http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2025067,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Former HP Chairman to Surrender

October 5, 2006 By Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO—Former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman Patricia Dunn is due to surrender to authorities on Thursday afternoon on felony charges for spying on reporters and company directors, the California attorney general's office said.

Prosecutors have requested Dunn's bail be set at $5,000 or that she be released on her own recognizance, according to her arrest warrant. Dunn, the former company leader charged with organizing a hunt for a boardroom leak, is expected to surrender at a courthouse in Silicon Valley.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed charges on Wednesday against Dunn and four other defendants because of tactics used in HP's effort in 2005 and 2006 to find the source of leaks to the media.

Dunn's attorney, Jim Brosnahan, has said that "these charges are being brought against the wrong person at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons" and that they were false.

"They are the culmination of a well-financed and highly orchestrated disinformation campaign," [First hint we've had that another entity was involved? Could this be the same guys who wrote the Da Vinci Code? Bob] he said.

All five defendants named face four felony charges: conspiracy; fraudulent use of wire, radio or television transmissions; taking, copying and using computer data; and using personal identifying information without authorization. Each count could bring a maximum of three years in jail.

Dunn is due to surrender a day before beginning treatment for recurrent ovarian cancer. Her arraignment date will be set on Thursday, the attorney general's office said.

... Dunn, who appeared last week before Congress to testify about the investigation, has said she regrets the way the probe was handled, but does not accept personal responsibility for any deceptive tactics used.

http://blog.eweek.com/blogs/knowitall/archive/2006/10/05/13635.aspx

Understanding transparency, the hard way

posted on Thursday, October 05, 2006 6:40 AM by Ed Cone

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. So goes the old joke about uncertain online identities.

But people will damn sure find out if you are a private eye snooping online for the now-former chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard, or a now-former United States Congressman kinking out via IM with teenage pages.

We live in an age of transparency. Apparently Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley didn't get the memo: Things don't stay hidden on the web.

Morals, ethics, and legalities aside, how could these powerful people make themselves so vulnerable to getting busted? My teenage son seems to understand more about covering his tracks online than the folks running our government and our largest companies.

Dunn's undoing involved, among other things, a tracking cookie left on the computer of private investigator Bryan Wagner as he had his way with online phone records at AT&T, according to this morning's New York Times. Dunn and Wagner are among the five people connected to the HP pretexting case charged yesterday with felonies by the State of California.

Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival.

We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders.

But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not.

Businesses need to maintain some degree of control over information, but HP's board seems to have completely ignored the culture of transparency in favor of the culture of the leak-obsessed Nixon White House. Or, perhaps, the culture of an offshore phishing and pharming operation, judging from the charges, which include, as the NYT reports, "using false pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility, unauthorized access of computer data, identity theft and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes."

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but everyone knows when you're busted. [Great line! Bob]

I love a good summary... I wonder who they could have been investigating to gather this information?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012701.html

October 05, 2006

DOJ Launches Project Safe Childhood Website

"The new Project Safe Childhood web site provides information to our community partners that will help protect our children from online exploitation and abuse."

• Refer to Project Safe Childhood Guide (all documents are in PDF), for: chart of federal statutes; list of relevant national programs; list of relevant state and local programs; roster of Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces and Affiliated Agencies.

Interior Dept again. These are the guys who haven't been able to figure out the royalties owed to Native Americans – even with a US Court breathing down their necks for the past 15(?) years! Question: Would the “average organization's” logs show anything different?

http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/53466.html

Study: Govt. Staffers Access Explicit Web Sites While at Work

By Jennifer Talhelm AP 10/05/06 8:45 AM PT

The Interior Department has released a report by Earl Devaney, its inspector general, entitled "Excessive Indulgences," that alleges widespread computer abuse by agency employees. Devaney called his findings "egregious" and "alarming," but noted the department since 1999 took just 177 disciplinary actions for inappropriate Internet use.

In one week, several Interior Department workers spent more than 30 minutes on sexually explicit Web sites.

That same week, another computer showed more than 2,300 log entries at two Internet gaming sites for about 14 hours.

Still another was logged into an Internet auction for almost eight hours.

Those were just some of the results of a week-long internal investigation of the 80,000 Interior Department employees with Internet access. The report by the department's inspector general, Earl Devaney, was made public Wednesday.

'Excessive Indulgences'

Devaney called his findings "egregious" and "alarming," but noted the department since 1999 took just 177 disciplinary actions for inappropriate Internet use. Of those, 112 were for accessing pornographic or sexually explicit Web sites.

His report is titled "Excessive Indulgences," and its cover features a photo montage, including a shot of a woman's bare stomach, to illustrate the types of Web sites employees visited.

"Computer users at the department have continued to access sexually explicit and gambling Web sites due to the lack of consistency in department controls over Internet use," he wrote. "Without strong and effective controls, we believe that this activity will continue and possibly increase."

Department officials say they are taking action to cut back on abuses by employees with Internet access.

Employees received a department-wide memo on Sept. 27 reminding them that some of the activities Devaney found "have significant legal and administrative consequences," and violators could be fired or turned over to the police.

Access Not Equal to Authorization

The department is working on blocking inappropriate Internet sites, the memo said. However, it reminded employees that "just because an inappropriate site is not blocked does not mean that it is authorized for access."

Devaney said he wanted to test just how effective the department's rules were for Internet usage. Most of the checks were for employees' visits to sexually explicit, gambling, gaming and auction sites, he said, because they obviously were not work-related and ate up employees' work hours.

Devaney also found, during one week of investigation, more than 1 million log entries in which 7,700 employees visited game and auction sites. More than 4,700 log entries were for sexually explicit and gambling Web sites.

It might be interesting to see the results of these subpoenas...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012700.html

October 05, 2006

Google Subpoenas Competitors in Defense of Copyright Suit

Following up on articles by Jonathan Band published on LLRX.com, The Google Library Project: The Copyright Debate, and The Authors Guild v. The Google Print Library Project, new today from Bloomberg: "Google Inc. will subpoena information from Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to help fight copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning project."

[From the article: Google, which doesn't disclose how many books it has scanned, also wants to know the title, authors and copyright status of books already offered through competitors' book projects, according to the documents.

... The cases are The Author's Guild v. Google Inc., 05cv8136 and the McGraw-Hill Cos. v Google Inc., 05cv8881, both U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A good analogy is like a good analogy!

http://techdirt.com/articles/20061005/234044.shtml

If Mod Chip Firms Get Fined, Should Pep Boys Start Calling Their Lawyers?

from the analogies dept

Imagine if you bought a car, and you wanted to mess around with it and turn it into a hotrod. While that may not be for everyone, it's a pretty common practice. Car owners are allowed to modify their cars, as long as it remains road safe. However, when it comes to video game consoles, the same sort of thing gets you in an awful lot of trouble. This isn't a new issue. Lawsuits against video game mod chip companies have gone on for years. While Italy has realized that mod chipping should be perfectly legal, many other countries still have a problem with it. The issue, is that while there are plenty of legitimate uses for mod chips, they can also be used to run unauthorized ("pirated") software, and that can violate the ever-infamous anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Recently, the feds started cracking down on mod chippers, and the news came out that a court has fined one firm over $9 million for selling mod chips and software that could be used to copy a game. Note, of course, that they were just selling the tool. They weren't the ones actually violating copyright. So why should it be illegal for someone to tinker with their gaming console, even if the tinkering could allow games to be copied? If they actually are copying games, that's one issue to deal with. But, simply selling a modified version doesn't seem like it should be illegal. Just imagine the uproar if the same rules applied to automobiles? Of course, with cars becoming increasingly computerized, it's probably only a matter of time until someone is sued for either modifying their car or selling the tools to do so.