Broadcasters are claiming in federal lawsuits Thursday that Dish Network’s DVR service, which allows the automatic skipping of commercials, breaches copyright law and retransmission agreements.

The suits by Fox, CBS and NBC are the broadcasters’ latest legal salvos against technological innovations, as those advances bring into question whether broadcasters’ longstanding business model can survive the digital age.

The Dish Network litigation concerns the March introduction of what the satellite company calls PrimeTime Anytime, which allows customers to record and store about a week’s worth of prime-time broadcast television. And two weeks ago, the Colorado company enabled playback of those archives without users seeing commercials.

The networks are labeling it a “bootleg” service that produces unauthorized copies of their shows and say it breaches signed licensing deals. And the consequences are dire, they warn. If the courts don’t block the service, it “will ultimately destroy the advertising-supported ecosystem that provides consumers with the choice to enjoy free over-the-air, varied, high-quality primetime broadcast programming,” the broadcasters told the court.

In the early 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled Americans have the fair use right to time-shift lawfully obtained content for later viewing. But that was using primitive technology like the VCR and Betamax, with limited recording capabilities. The Dish service records a day’s prime time lineup from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and stores up to 100 hours of those shows for up to eight days — all without the broadcasters’ consent.

“Fox has not consented to the recording of its copyrighted programs by Dish, or to the distribution by Dish to its subscribers of copies of all of Fox’s prime time programming for subsequent on-demand, commercial-free viewing,” Fox wrote in its suit.

Dish has also lodged its own federal lawsuit, seeking a declaratory judgement that its service is legal.

“Dish’s subscribers, private home viewers sitting in their living rooms, may fairly choose for themselves the content that they do and do not want to watch, and have paid for the right to do so,” Dish said in the filing. (.pdf)

Dish said that its customers, “with one click,” are doing the copying of the broadcasts, and have that right. And the broadcasters are still getting their retransmission fees, the company added.

“Dish subscribers are already paying for their television service. Dish passes along hundreds of millions of dollars collected from its subscriber base to the major television networks in the form of retransmission fees,” Dish said in its filing.

Analysts suspect the ad-skipping feature was just introduced to give Dish leverage in the next round of retransmission-fee negotiations. The Big Four broadcasters’ retransmission fees doubled last year to combined $394 million, and might double again this year, Variety said.

Variety quoted Janney Capital Markets analyst Tony Wible as saying the broadcasters are overstating their case. He suggested the ad-skipping feature might eat into 1 percent of their advertising revenue, about $162 million.

But the feature does point to an interesting possible future of a TiVo without real limitations. Given how storage prices continue to drop and that you can buy a 1Terabyte hard drive for under $100, one could imagine a future where anyone who wanted to could skip all commercials by having every show recorded to disk.

The development comes a week before a New York federal judge is set to hear broadcasters’ arguments that an upstart technology company called Aereo that streams over-the-air broadcasts to New Yorkers should be shut down.

Aereo’s New York customers basically rent two tiny antennas, each about the size of a dime. Tens of thousands of the antennas are housed in a Brooklyn data center. One antenna — unique to a customer — is used when a customer wants to watch a program in real time from a computer, tablet or mobile phone. The other works with a DVR service to record programs for later online viewing.

Federal retransmission licensing agreements are silent when it comes to internet streaming, so Aereo claims it does not have to licensing fees. The broadcasters claim Aereo is practicing “technological gimmickry” to skirt paying them licensing fees.

Each month, Google removes more than 1 million links to infringing content such as movies, video games, music and software from its search results — with about half of those requests for removal last month coming from Microsoft.

The search and advertising giant revealed the data Thursday as it released sortable analytics on the massive number of copyright takedown requests it receives — adding to its already existing data on the number of times governments ask for users’ personal data.

The Mountain View, California-based company removes links to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA requires search engines to remove links to infringing content at a rights holder’s request or else face liability for copyright infringement itself. Google said it complies with about 97 percent of requests, which are submitted via an online form and usually approved via a Google algorithm.

The disclosure marks the first time a major internet search engine divulged its DMCA compliance numbers. The development comes months after some lawmakers blasted Google’s position against the Stop Online Piracy Act, an anti-piracy measure that would have fundamentally altered the DNS system, a core part of the net’s infrastructure in the name of piracy.

Google rejected some of the requests, Fred von Lohmann, Google’s senior copyright attorney said, because “the form is incomplete, the web page doesn’t exist or we look at it and say we don’t think it is infringing.”

The top rights holders demanding removal of links were Microsoft, at 543,000 last month, the British Recorded Music Industry at 162,000 and NBC at 145,000. The top targeted sites hosting allegedly infringing content were filestube.com at more than 43,000, torrents.eu at more than 23,000, and 4shared.com at more than 22,000.

The Pirate Bay, the most notorious online haven for copyrighted content, came in at an unimpressive 13th place, with 10,245 requests for takedowns of links to the site.

Von Lohmann said the data could be useful as lawmakers debate laws aimed at combating online infringement.

“Obviously, we know that policy makers in the U.S. and elsewhere are trying to think of proposed solutions to the online infringement problem,” he said. “In our view, those discussions are benefited by accurate data.”

Overall, Google received 1.24 million requests from 1,296 copyright owners for removal the past month. They targeted 24,129 domains.

The data largely goes back nearly a year, around the time Google began automating its removal procedure and making it easier for rights holders to issue demands via an online link. Sortable data before that time was not readily available, von Lohmann said.  But before the removal process became automated, Google said in a blog post that it removed less than 250,000 links in all of 2009.

Removal of links has become big business, as rights holders often farm out such duties. Marketly, of Redmond, Washington, issued almost 462,000 demands for link removal, earning it the top spot last month. The British Recorded Music Industry came in second last month, with more than 190,000 links.

NBC was apparently the only major organization working on its own behalf, according to Google’s data.

When news outlets recently quoted U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claiming that State Department operatives hacked the websites of al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen, we didn’t know whether to be proud of the feds’ leet skills or appalled at the administration’s hypocrisy regarding hacking.

Turns out the hacks who wrote the stories got it wrong – though Danger Room’s David Axe, who was on the scene, got the story right the first go-around. And now, with the hyped headlines dialed back, we’re just disappointed.

Turns out the team simply purchased anti-al-Qaida ads on the websites to counter anti-American ads the sites were running.

Call it Operation AdWords, if you like.

Clinton was delivering a keynote speech at the Special Operations Command gala dinner in Tampa, Florida, when, as the Associated Press reported, she described how State Department specialists attacked sites tied to al-Qaida, which were trying to recruit new members by “bragging about killing Americans.”

“Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll al-Qaida attacks have taken on the Yemeni people,” Clinton said, according to the AP. “We can tell our efforts are starting to have an impact because extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking supporters not to believe everything they read on the internet.”

The AP rushed out a story with the headline “Hillary Clinton: U.S. Hacked Yemen al-Qaida Sites,” only to revise the story with a more demure headline later, reading “Clinton: US wars with al-Qaida on the web.”

The latter story included new quotes from a State Department official clarifying that the specialist didn’t actually hack the sites. Instead, he said, they challenged extremists in open forums.

“We parody and poke holes in what they do,” the unnamed official said. He also explained that after al-Qaida supporters launched a new series of banner ads focusing on fighting Americans that depicted U.S.-flag-draped coffins, the State Department team countered the ads with their own.

They essentially launched a counterterrorism-by-AdWords campaign by purchasing anti-al-Qaida ads on the same site, featuring the coffins of Yemeni civilians killed in terrorist attacks.

Smart diplomacy in the internet era, but at best it’s a clever hack, not clever hacking.

UPDATE 2:40pm: A State Department spokeswoman has muddied the waters even further by now indicating that the ads weren’t even ads. She refers to them as “posts” and says they were free. No government funds were paid out to the web site in question. Below is an exchange the State Dept. spokeswoman had with reporters:

MS. NULAND: … So the specific case that the Secretary mentioned was a case where there was a nasty piece of al-Qaida propaganda, and we did our own counter-spoof of that as an effort to try to get our own message across. Whenever we do this, we make clear that we identify ourselves clearly as part of the State Department’s digital outreach team, so it’s always clear who the sponsors of the alternative posts are.

And let me also just make clear that we don’t hack. We don’t engage in covert activities. All of the work is attributed, as I said. In general, we usually do it on free sites and we do it in a free manner. Obviously, if we use YouTube, everybody pays on YouTube, so we do that, too.

QUESTION: So this was not hacking as such?

MS. NULAND: Correct. It was not. It was an alternative.

…

QUESTION: And can you describe a little bit more, I mean, what – in the timeframe, when this was happening? Was it only Yemen or are there other places?

MS. NULAND: No, the center operates anywhere that – in cyberspaces in particular, where we see propaganda that is put up by al-Qaida, by its affiliates. It posts on any sites where it finds this stuff. In this case, it was countering a site that was based or affiliated with Yemeni terrorists. But it does that anywhere in the world where it finds this kind of thing.

QUESTION: Can you just describe a little bit about what kind of – what your posts look like, what they said, versus what people were reading there?

MS. NULAND: My understanding of this particular post that the Secretary shouted out, the Yemeni site had put up pictures of coffins draped in American flags. We put up a counter-post of coffins draped in Yemeni flags to indicate that it is Yemenis who are dying at the hands of al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen.

QUESTION: Is that in good taste?

QUESTION: Okay. I just want to –

MS. NULAND: This is a matter of countering propaganda that is in the absolute worst taste.

QUESTION: But that’s – but my question is: Why is putting up what you described as a spoof with flags of – with Yemeni flags on top of coffins to try to make the point that it is Yemenis who are dying? You could easily look at that and think, well god, we’re – they’re just talking about killing Yemenis for example. So –

MS. NULAND: No, I appreciate your question, Arshad. The original post took pride in the killing of Americans. The point that we were trying to make in parallel was that, in fact, through this kind of activity, through this kind of propagation of violent extremism, through the kind of violent acts that groups like this are engaged in, it is actually more Yemenis who are meeting their death.

QUESTION: And do you regard it as a tasteful and proper use of U.S. Government funds to – just because somebody else puts out an image that you find offensive doesn’t necessarily mean that you should put up an image to make a point that others may find or may interpret offensively. And I just wonder if a lot of thought was given to the appropriateness and tastefulness for the U.S. Government to be putting up a photograph of coffins with Yemeni flags up.

MS. NULAND: Again Arshad, this is a site that is endeavoring to incite violence. We are simply making the point that the violence that they are inciting is ricocheting back against the local population and is not in service to a strong, stable, peaceful Yemen, but in fact is having the opposite effect.

So we are countering propaganda with a counter-narrative that we believe is closer to the truth of the situation.

Please.

QUESTION: I want to clarify: So in this instance, these – posting of these alternative ads was free and you could just post them up on the website, or was this an instance where they were paid for to be posted?

MS. NULAND: The information that I have at the moment is that particular one was one that was – that we did not have to – that was not paid for.

QUESTION: Okay.

MS. NULAND: There are instances where we do have to pay for it.

QUESTION: Okay. And then, in those instances where you do have to pay for them, what kind of vetting goes into these websites in terms of where those funds for the ads would go?

MS. NULAND: Well again, you are talking about putting up a counter-ad in – on a paid site like YouTube. So something has been paid for by the extremists, and we are paying for the counter.

QUESTION: Okay. So you wouldn’t put it up on the extremist site, I guess is what my question is. Is there like a conscious thought process?

MS. NULAND: There is a full vetting; there is a whole team that does these things. We’re not, sort of, out there.

Photo courtesy U.S. State Dept.

Tens of thousands of these tiny antennas are housed in a Brooklyn data center. They capture over-the-air TV broadcasts, which are then streamed over the internet to Aereo customers in New York. Photo: Aereo

Two digital rights groups urged a federal court Wednesday not to shut down an upstart technology company that streams over-the-air broadcasts to New Yorkers.

Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a friend-of-the-court brief, said the courts should not shutter Aereo, as broadcasters are asking, simply because there is no federal licensing scheme yet for internet streaming of over-the-air broadcasts (one exists for cable companies).

Aereo’s New York customers basically rent two tiny antennas, each about the size of a dime. Tens of thousands of the antennas are housed in a Brooklyn data center. One antenna — unique to a customer — is used when a customer wants to watch a program in real time from a computer, tablet or mobile phone. The other works with a DVR service to record programs for later online viewing.

Aereo, which offers the service free but plans to charge about $12 monthly, does not divulge the number of its customers.

The broadcasters said Aereo is practicing “technological gimmickry” to skirt paying them licensing fees. Aereo’s business model, they said, “usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.”

But just because there’s no licensing mechanism doesn’t mean the unique service Aereo offers amounts to copyright infringement, the rights groups countered.

“Plaintiffs list particular examples of harms allegedly brought about by Aereo’s conduct, and claim them as being irreparable and substantial. However, the only cognizable harms amount to Aereo’s failing to pay licensing fees plaintiffs presume that they are entitled to,” the groups wrote the New York judge presiding over the case.

Shuttering the service, which the groups contend does not infringe the copyrights of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and other local broadcasters, “would deny to the public the benefit of advances in technology, contrary to the purpose of the Copyright Act.”

A hearing on whether the upstart, backed by financier Barry Diller, should be shut down is set to be heard in a New York federal courtroom next week.

In our earlier analysis of the case, we noted that, if Aereo were a cable or satellite company, it could transmit publicly available broadcast signals to its customers — under a complicated licensing-fee structure. Copyright holders in the programs being re-broadcasted have no say in the matter, under what is known as compulsory licensing. Congress adopted the licensing structure for cable and satellite following Supreme Court decisions in the ’60s and ’70s that allowed cable companies to hijack over-the-air broadcasts and include them in their primitive television packages.

And herein lies a 21st Century anomaly: The federally mandated licensing structure put into place is silent when it comes to internet streaming of over-the-air broadcasts that are carried over public airwaves. That’s why Aereo claims that, because of its proprietary technology that captures broadcasts and streams them to paying customers, it doesn’t need anyone’s permission to supply freely available television signals.

One of two GPS trackers found last year on the vehicle of a young man in California. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

A federal judge in Kentucky has ruled that 150 pounds of marijuana collected from a drug suspect’s car is not admissible evidence in court because investigators illegally used a GPS tracker without a warrant to uncover it.

U.S. District Judge Amul R. Thapar has barred prosecutors from using the marijuana stash, allegedly found in the car of 49-year-old Robert Dale Lee last year, because they had not obtained a warrant authorizing the use of the GPS tracker they placed on his vehicle as part of a multi-state drug investigation, according to the Associated Press.

A Kentucky State Police trooper allegedly found the pot when he stopped Lee’s vehicle in September 2011 after Drug Enforcement Agency investigators had tracked it from Chicago to Lexington, Kentucky. The DEA agents had reportedly placed the tracker on Lee’s car after a cooperating witness told investigators that Lee, who had prior convictions around the possession of a gun and drugs, had been transporting marijuana from Illinois to Kentucky.

“In this case, the DEA agents had their fishing poles out to catch Lee,” Judge Thapar wrote in his ruling. “Admittedly, the agents did not intend to break the law. But, they installed a GPS device on Lee’s car without a warrant in the hope that something might turn up.”

The ruling contravenes recent ones in other states, where federal judges in California, Hawaii and Iowa have found that evidence gathered through the warrantless use of covert GPS vehicle trackers can be used to prosecute suspects.

The patchwork rulings underscore a nationwide problem that has arisen in the wake of a Supreme Court decision earlier this year, which found that the use of GPS trackers on a person’s vehicle constituted a search under the Constitution, which would require, in nearly all cases, a warrant.

Because three U.S. District courts ruled prior to the Supreme Court decision that the use of GPS trackers without a warrant was lawful, federal judges in those districts — which cover 19 states as well as Guam and the Mariana Islands — have found that law enforcement agents and prosecutors in their regions can use a so-called “good faith exception” to support warrantless GPS surveillance in pending cases where data was gathered prior to the Supreme Court ruling.

Circuit courts in the 7th (covering Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana), 8th (covering Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota) and 9th (covering Alaska, Arizona, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, the Mariana Islands, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington) all ruled prior to the Supreme Court case that warrantless GPS tracking was legal.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett in Iowa ruled (.pdf) that the GPS tracking evidence gathered by DEA agents against a suspected local drug trafficker prior to the Supreme Court ruling could be submitted in court. He made the ruling under a so-called “good faith” exception, because the agents were relying on what was then a binding 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals precedent that authorized the use of warrantless GPS trackers for surveillance in Iowa.

Judges in two other GPS cases in California and Hawaii, both in the 9th Circuit where a precedent ruling exists, asserted the same “good faith” exception in March.

The exception comes from a 2011 Supreme Court case, Davis v. United States (.pdf), which allows a good-faith exception for searches that reasonably relied on binding precedents that were later found to be faulty.

But luckily for Lee, Kentucky, where he is being prosecuted, falls in the 6th circuit (.pdf), which had no such ruling on GPS prior to the Supreme Court case.

According to court documents, a DEA task force officer placed the GPS tracker on Lee’s car on Sept. 2, 2011 while the suspect was meeting with his federal probation officer in London, Kentucky. Three days later, DEA agents noticed that Lee had driven to Chicago and were tracking him as he returned to Kentucky. The officer tipped off a state trooper that Lee was likely transporting marijuana.

The trooper stationed himself with a drug-sniffing dog along the highway Lee was traveling, and pulled the suspect over under the premise that he was driving without a seat belt. When Lee consented to a search of the car, the drug-sniffing dog honed in on the drug stash.

Judge Thapar wrote that the DEA’s use of the GPS tracker was unlawful because the investigator had no binding court precedent he was relying on to use the device.

“Without GPS tracking data, the DEA agents would not have known that Lee traveled to Chicago (to pick up the drugs), that he was returning to Kentucky along I-75, or his exact position,” Thapur wrote.

Law enforcement’s use of GPS vehicle trackers came under increased scrutiny last year when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of United States v. Jones, which also involved the use of GPS trackers in a drug investigation.

Antoine Jones was given a life sentence by a lower court for drug trafficking, based in part on evidence gathered with a GPS vehicle tacker placed on his Jeep. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., later ruled that collecting data from the GPS device amounted to a search, and therefore required a warrant. Prosecutors argued that the device only collected the same information that anyone on a public street could glean from physically following the suspect. But the appellate court judge wrote in his ruling that the persistent, nonstop surveillance afforded by a GPS tracker was much different from physically tracking a suspect on a single trip.

The Obama administration called the appellate decision “vague and unworkable,” and petitioned the Supreme Court to rule that authorities did not need to obtain a warrant to use the devices. The Supreme Court justices ruled earlier this year in January that GPS tracking of a suspect’s vehicle qualified as a search under the U.S. Constitution, but stopped short of ruling that authorities needed to obtain a warrant every time they used a tracker.

The justices said that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge, but did not say definitively whether such a search was unreasonable and required a warrant. Most legal experts, however, say the implication is that the use of such devices would require a warrant on any investigations going forward.

A district court sentenced 27-year-old Georgy Avanesov, a Russian citizen of Armenian descent, to four years in prison on charges of creating and spreading the Bredolab virus that infected an estimated 30 million computers around the world. The malware siphoned bank account passwords and other confidential information from infected computers.

According to prosecutors, Avanesov developed Bredolab in Armenia around March 2009 and used computer servers in Holland and France to spread the virus. They say he earned about $125,000 a month renting out access to compromised computers in his botnet so that criminals could use them to spread other malware, send out spam, or use them to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Avanesov reportedly confessed to investigators that he had written Bredolab, but denied having any knowledge of its criminal usage. He simply made it available to others, he argued, without foreknowledge of how they planned to use it.

He was arrested in 2010 after Dutch authorities seized control of about 143 infected computer servers that were servicing the botnet.

Although Armenia is not a leading haven for cybercriminals, the arrest and conviction of Avanesov there can be viewed as part of an encouraging trend to law enforcement agencies in the west, since it shows a willingness in some East European countries to begin clamping down on cyber criminals in a region that has long turned a blind eye to such activity.

Image courtesy FBI

After months of anticipation, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will get a final ruling from a British court next Wednesday on his appeal of an extradition order to Sweden to face sex crimes allegations.

Assange, who has been under house arrest for a year and a half, asked the Supreme Court last February to overturn an order extraditing him to Sweden on grounds that the European arrest warrant issued against him was invalid because the Swedish prosecutor behind it was “working for the executive” and was therefore not a proper judicial authority, as the law requires.

Swedish authorities have maintained that the arrest warrant was proper and valid because in the early stages of an investigation when an arrest is first being sought, judicial authorities do not have to be independent or impartial.

Should the seven justices of the Supreme Court agree with Sweden and uphold the extradition ruling, Assange will have one last chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Assange lost his initial fight against extradition last year, but appealed it before a High Court. That court rejected his appeal last November.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal of that verdict earlier this year. The case is significant because it could throw into question other extradition cases in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe if the justices rule that the Swedish prosecutor was not a valid authority for requesting an arrest warrant.

Assange has not been charged with any crime in Sweden, and used that fact as his primary defense in his earlier appeal to the High Court.

The High Court rejected this argument, as well as the argument questioning the validity of the warrant, and ordered that Assange must be returned to Sweden.

Assange then sought permission from the High Court to appeal to the Supreme Court. In order to do so, his attorneys had to show the High Court that his case related to a matter of public importance that went beyond Assange. The High Court refrained from asserting that his case met this criteria, but nonetheless gave him permission to ask the Supreme Court directly to hear his appeal, though a High Court judge asserted that Assange’s chance of succeeding in the Supreme Court was “extraordinarily slim.”

Assange is being sought for questioning in Sweden on rape and coercion allegations stemming from sexual relations he had with two women in that country in August 2010. One woman has claimed that Assange pinned her down to have sex with her and intentionally tore a condom he wore. The second woman claims that he had sex with her while she was initially asleep, failing to wear a condom despite repeated requests for him to do so. Assange has disputed their claims.

Assange has denied any wrongdoing, asserting that the sex in both cases was consensual.

Photo: Julian Assange (center) speaks to the media, flanked by his lawyers Mark Stephens (left) and Jennifer Robinson after making an appearance at Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London, Jan. 11, 2011. Matt Dunham/AP

Photo: Marco Fieber/Flickr

Facebook is agreeing in “principle” to settle allegations that its “Sponsored Stories” advertising platform breached its users’ privacy.

Terms of the deal (.pdf) were not immediately disclosed. The suit, (.pdf) filed in April 2011, claimed that the social-networking site did not adequately provide a way to opt out of the advertising program that began in January 2011.

Sponsored stories work like this: If a Facebook user “likes” an advertiser, that user’s profile and picture may appear on some of their friends’ Facebook pages — in ads — stating that the person, indeed, “likes” that advertiser. Facebook also reserves the right to do this on ads that appear on sites other than Facebook, though it has not done that.

Facebook and class-action attorneys were set to hold oral arguments Thursday in a San Jose, California, federal courtroom on whether the case could proceed as a class action representing perhaps millions of Facebook users. The lawyers wrote U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Tuesday that they have executed “a term sheet memorializing their settlement in principle.”

The development comes on the third trading day following Facebook’s IPO. It closed at $31, down from the original $38 asking price on Friday. The settlement agreement will eventually become public and requires Koh’s signature.

In November, the Federal Trade Commission slapped Facebook’s hand and settled government charges it “deceived” users that their information would be kept private, although it was “repeatedly” shared with the public.

The FTC deal, among other things, required Facebook to submit to a privacy audit every two years for the next two decades. The accord, which carried no financial penalties, demands that the social-networking site obtain “express consent” of its 850 million users before their information “is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.”

Regarding Tuesday’s settlement, the ad settings at issue are not contained in Facebook’s privacy settings, and instead are in a section called Facebook Ads under the main profile settings.

While terms of Tuesday’s settlement were not lodged with Judge Koh, we suspect they will be similar to a 2010 settlement in a different Facebook privacy flap.

In that case, a  federal judge approved a $9.5 million settlement to a class-action lawsuit challenging Facebook’s so-called “Beacon” program that monitored and published what users of the site were buying or renting from Blockbuster, Overstock and other locations without users’ permission.

The lawyers in that case were awarded about $3 million of the pot, and the remainder was earmarked for grants to study online privacy.

Facebook, without admitting wrongdoing, terminated the Beacon program, though much of it has resurfaced under the guise of Facebook’s so-called “frictionless sharing.”

Under the latest deal, Facebook users likely would have to opt in to participate in the “Sponsored Stories” program or be provided a clear mechanism to opt out. It was not immediately known whether Facebook would kill the “Sponsored Stories” program.

The five named plaintiffs in the case will likely receive several thousand dollars each, while Facebook likely will admit no wrongdoing.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers, who likely will reap millions in the latest case, did not immediately respond for comment. Facebook declined comment.

NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: Courtesy NSA

The National Security Agency is partnering with select universities to train students in cyber operations for intelligence, military and law enforcement jobs, work that will remain secret to all but a select group of students and faculty who pass clearance requirements, according to Reuters.

The cyber-operations curriculum is part of the Obama administration’s national initiative to improve cybersecurity through education, and is designed to prepare students for jobs with the U.S. Cyber Command, the NSA’s signals intelligence operations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies that investigate cyber crimes.

The U.S. Cyber Command’s job is, in part, to support the military in offensive cyber operations against enemy networks, suggesting the students would be trained in the methods of hackers.

“We’re trying to create more of these, and yes they have to know some of the things that hackers know, they have to know a lot of other things too, which is why you really want a good university to create these people for you,” Neal Ziring, technical director at the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, told Reuters.

But another NSA official was quick to add that the NSA wasn’t looking to teach students illegal hacking techniques.

“We are not asking them to teach kids how to break into systems, we’re not asking them to teach that. And a lot of them have said they wouldn’t teach that,” said Steven LaFountain, a senior NSA official who guides academic programs told Reuters. “We’re just asking them to teach the hardcore fundamental science that we need students to have when they come to work here.”

Although 20 universities applied to participate in the program, only four were selected so far: Dakota State University, Naval Postgraduate School, Northeastern University and University of Tulsa.

Schools applying for the program had to meet 10 criteria, among them was a requirement that they teach courses in reverse engineering.

Once the students have the basic knowledge needed, they will be eligible to receive training to work in classified jobs with the NSA.

“In our operational developmental organization, we would spend up to 12 months to give them the secret sauce, the tradecraft, the really deep technical training so that they could make themselves useful in doing what we need them to do, and that’s with that technical underpinning,” Captain Jill Newton, who leads NSA’s cyber training and education programs, told Reuters.

Photo: dcwriterdawn/Flickr

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”?

Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved.

Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

Had the internet been around in the late 1700s, perhaps the anonymously written Federalist Papers would have to be taken down unless Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay revealed themselves.

“This statute would essentially destroy the ability to speak anonymously online on sites in New York,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology. He added that the legislation provides a “heckler’s veto to anybody who disagrees with or doesn’t like what an anonymous poster said.”

Sen. Thomas O’Mara, a Republican who is also sponsoring the measure, said it would “help lend some accountability to the internet age.”

A cynic, however, might see an attempt by lawmakers to prop up Facebook’s falling stock price via an implicit endorsement of the Facebook model of identity on the internet.

The Senate and Assembly measures, which are identical, cover messages on social networks, blogs, message boards or “any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

The bills also demand those sites to have a contact number or e-mail address posted for “such removal requests, clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.”

Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content.