U.S. Copyright Surveillance Machine About To Be Switched On, Promises of Transparency Already BrokenMitch Stoltz Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers. Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywoods private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses shed have in a courtroom. The educational materials posted for subscribers thus far look more like propaganda, slanted towards major entertainment companies view of copyright. And all of this was set up with the encouragement and endorsement of the U.S. government. One of the mechanisms that was supposed to ensure some degree of fairness was independent auditing of the P2P surveillance methods used to identify alleged infringers, and of the ISPs procedures for matching Internet Protocol addresses to actual humans. But last month, the group set up to oversee the system the Center for Copyright Information revealed that its independent reviewer was Stroz Friedberg, a lobbying firm that represented the Recording Industry Association of America in the halls of Congress from 2004 to 2009. Needless to say, RIAAs former lobbying firm is hardly an independent reviewer. And CCI could have discovered the relationship between Stroz and the RIAA its on the public record, in reports that lobbyists must file with Congress every year. It gets worse. In response to criticism of this obvious conflict of interest, CCI acknowledged that [r]ecent reports that a former employee of Stroz Friedberg lobbied several years ago on behalf of RIAA on matters unrelated to CCI have raised questions about the groups impartiality. In the name of maintaining transparency, CCI released the Stroz report to the public last week. Theres a lot we simply cant tell from this heavily redacted report. Most importantly, we have no way of knowing if legal, non-infringing uses of copyrighted movies and music will be flagged as infringing, leading to escalating mitigation measures for law-abiding Internet subscribers. We dont know what, if any, protocols other than BitTorrent the system will be snooping on. And we dont know how, or how accurately, the ISPs match IP addresses to the names of actual human beings. That process, says CCI, was described in another Stroz Friedberg report that hasnt been released. CCI and its backers have made every effort to portray the system as fair and balanced. But subscribers are rightly wary of a copyright surveillance machine that dispenses warnings and punishments based on a secret process. Hopefully CCI will go to greater lengths to find an independent reviewer next time but were not optimistic. According to CCI, this fatally flawed system, created via a backroom deal with no subscriber input, will start spying on U.S. subscribers Internet usage, and sending out warnings and punishments, before the end of 2012. In light of what we already know, the better course would be to press reset. Please visit The Electronic Frontier Foundation for the latest copyright, privacy, and digital surveillance news. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 