In the UK Lily Allen joined calls for a crackdown on file-sharing

The European Parliament has approved a major overhaul of telecoms law across Europe.

The package includes a provision for "internet freedom" - the first time it has been referred to in law as fundamental right says the EU.

Member states have until May 24 2011 to include the legislation in their own rules.

It comes amid controversial laws being introduced in France and the UK to cut off persistent illegal downloaders.

Protecting internet access and users' rights was a high priority for MEPs hammering out the Telecoms Package.

Many critics say the eventual compromise solution is too weak and will not prevent disconnections.

Other measures in the telecoms package include an aim to harmonise the way mobile broadband is rolled out across the EU, which would help in the push to achieve 100% broadband coverage in Europe by 2013.

It also seeks to improve co-operation between member states' telecoms regulators and make it easier for incumbent operators to both provide and buy network services.

A law on citizens' rights aims to improve how quickly customers can change their mobile telephone number and strengthen personal data and privacy protection by, for example, allowing users to opt in to the use of cookies.

Fair hearing

Perhaps the most scrutinised part of the package is that which relates to file-sharing.

It comes as individual member states introduce tough penalties for those who download content illegally.

France has introduced a "three strikes" policy for those who share illegal content. If letters fail to stop them, illegal file-sharers risk being disconnected.

And the UK's Digital Economy Bill also seeks to impose technical restrictions, including disconnection, on persistent pirates.

Earlier this month, MEPs agreed on a compromise solution to protect user's rights which read: "A user's internet access may be restricted, if necessary and proportionate, only after a fair and impartial procedure including the user's right to be heard."

What the fair and impartial procedure will mean in practice is, as yet, unclear.

MEPs also agreed that restrictions on a user's internet access can only be taken "with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy".

But an earlier amendment which ruled that any application for cutting off internet access must go through a judge was rejected.

Some critics say the compromise is too weak while some lawyers argue that it could put the UK's newly introduced Digital Economy bill at odds with the Telecoms Package.

Meanwhile protests over the UK bill have grown, with 11,000 signing an e-petition against it while others predicted "civil unrest" as a result of the bill.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: October 16, 2009

WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

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Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Jefferson Morley, a journalist and author, on Oct. 8 in his office in Washington with documents released to him by the C.I.A.

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Central Intelligence Agency

George Joannides, center, in July 1981, with his wife, Violet, and Bobby R. Inman, deputy director of the C.I.A.

Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.

That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

“The C.I.A.’s conduct is maddening,” said Mr. Morley, 51, a former Washington Post reporter and the author of a 2008 biography of a former C.I.A. station chief in Mexico.

After years of meticulous reporting on Mr. Joannides, who died at age 68 in 1990, he is convinced that there is more to learn.

“I know there’s a story here,” Mr. Morley said. “The confirmation is that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive.”

Mr. Morley’s quest has gained prominent supporters, including John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who served in 1994 and 1995 as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, created by Congress to unearth documents related to the case.

“I think we were probably misled by the agency,” Judge Tunheim said, referring to the Joannides records. “This material should be released.”

Gerald Posner, the author of an anti-conspiracy account of the Kennedy assassination, “Case Closed” (Random House, 1993), said the C.I.A.’s withholding such aged documents was “a perfect example of why nobody trusts the agency.”

“It feeds the conspiracy theorists who say, ‘You’re hiding something,” ’ Mr. Posner said.

After losing an appeals court decision in Mr. Morley’s lawsuit, the C.I.A. released material last year confirming Mr. Joannides’s deep involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security.

“The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and 1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies,” a C.I.A. official wrote in a court filing.

An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the C.I.A. had opened to Judge Tunheim’s board all files relevant to the assassination and denied that it was trying to avoid embarrassment. “The record doesn’t support that, any more than it supports conspiracy theories, offensive on their face, that the C.I.A. had a hand in President Kennedy’s death,” Mr. Gimigliano said.

C.I.A. secrecy has been hotly debated this year, with agency officials protesting the Obama administration’s decision to release legal opinions describing brutal interrogation methods. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, came under attack from Republicans after she accused the C.I.A. of misleading Congress about waterboarding, adding, “They mislead us all the time.”

On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.

In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.

In the years since Oswald was named as the assassin, speculation about who might have been behind him has never ended, with various theories focusing on Mr. Castro, the mob, rogue government agents or myriad combinations of the above. Mr. Morley, one of many writers to become entranced by the story, insists he has no theory and is seeking only the facts.

His lawsuit has uncovered the central role in overseeing directorate activities of Mr. Joannides, the deputy director for psychological warfare at the C.I.A.’s Miami station, code-named JM/WAVE. He worked closely with directorate leaders, documents show, corresponding with them under pseudonyms, paying their travel expenses and achieving an “important degree of control” over the group, as a July 1963 agency fitness report put it.

Fifteen years later, Mr. Joannides turned up again as the agency’s representative to the House assassinations committee. Dan Hardway, then a law student working for the committee, recalled Mr. Joannides as “a cold fish,” who firmly limited access to documents. Once, Mr. Hardway remembered, “he handed me a thin file and just stood there. I blew up, and he said, ‘This is all you’re going to get.’ ”

But neither Mr. Hardway nor the committee’s staff director, G. Robert Blakey, had any idea that Mr. Joannides had played a role in the very anti-Castro activities from 1963 that the panel was scrutinizing.

When Mr. Morley first informed him about it a decade ago, Mr. Blakey was flabbergasted. “If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath — he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,” said Mr. Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “How do we know what he didn’t give us?”

After Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “J.F.K.” fed speculation about the Kennedy assassination, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to release documents. But because the board, too, was not told of Mr. Joannides’s 1963 work, it did not peruse his records, said Judge Tunheim, the chairman.

“If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records,” Judge Tunheim said.

No matter what comes of Mr. Morley’s case in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Tunheim said he might ask the current C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, to release the records, even if the names of people who are still alive must be redacted for privacy.

What motive could C.I.A. officials have to bury the details of Mr. Joannides’s work for so long? Did C.I.A. officers or their Cuban contacts know more about Oswald than has been revealed? Or was the agency simply embarrassed by brushes with the future assassin — like the Dallas F.B.I. officials who, after the assassination, destroyed a handwritten note Oswald had previously left for an F.B.I. agent?

Or has Mr. Morley spent a decade on a wild goose chase?

Max Holland, who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, said the agency might be trying to preserve the principle of secrecy.

“If you start going through the files of every C.I.A. officer who had anything to do with anything that touched the assassination, that would have no end,” Mr. Holland said.

Mr. Posner, the anti-conspiracy author, said that if there really were something explosive involving the C.I.A. and President Kennedy, it would not be in the files — not even in the documents the C.I.A. has fought to keep secret.

“Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this,” Mr. Posner said. “But if there really were a C.I.A. plot, no documents would exist.”

By Ian Youngs Music reporter, BBC News

Media regulator Ofcom could be given powers to punish file-sharers

An alliance of music stars, songwriters and record producers has spoken out against UK government proposals to kick file-sharers off the internet.

Persistent file-sharers could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy.

But Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien, a member of the Featured Artists' Coalition (FAC), said: "It's going to start a war which they'll never win."

The FAC said "heavy-handed" tactics may turn fans away from music for good.

The FAC, a pressure group formed to represent performers, has joined forces with the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild.

In a joint statement, the three bodies of music-makers said they "vehemently oppose" the plans to punish file-sharers.

That is in contrast to major record labels and many other commercial arms of the music industry, who have welcomed the suggestions.

Phonographic Performance Limited, which licenses recorded music and music videos for public performance and broadcast said the majority of its 40,000 members were "not household names" and "they deserve to be protected from theft".

PPL chairman Fran Nevrkla added: "It is time we had an online world more akin to the High Street than the Wild West."

His sentiment was echoed by the Creative Coalition Campaign - a partnership between trade unions representing people working in the creative industries.

"Our creative sector produces world-class content, bringing joy to countless people across the UK and the world, but this can't be sustained if illegal file-sharing persists," said a statement from the coalition.

"There has never been a more critical time to take bold action against those who are threatening the livelihoods of everyone working in the entertainment sector."

We don't want to make enemies of our fans Dave Rowntree (right) Blur

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree said the FAC was against file-sharing, but that previous attempts at legal action had turned fans against the music industry and the artists themselves.

"We don't want to make enemies of our fans," he told BBC News. "The sensible thing to do is to try to see how we can monetise all this file-sharing activity, which is evidence of a lot of interest in music."

It would be very difficult to find out who was swapping files and whether those files contained copyrighted recordings, he warned.

Singer and fellow FAC board member Billy Bragg described the measures as a "very heavy sledgehammer".

"We're concerned that, in an age where there is much greater competition for attention, these proposals are in danger of driving young people away from the idea of listening to music," he said.

"As musicians, we're worried about that."

Many young fans had discovered his music through file-sharing, Bragg said, and paid for his music in other ways, such as buying gig tickets.

"We should be encouraging people to become music fans, and whether we like it or not, illicit downloading does encourage people to become music fans."

 

There are more positive ways of dealing with this without totally upsetting your consumers Patrick Rackow British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors

Speaking of the proposal to cut off pirates, Ed O'Brien predicted: "It won't work. It's as simple as that.

"I was talking to a serial file-sharer the other day, who is a friend. He downloads films and he hasn't paid for music for six years.

"I asked his opinion of it and he laughed. He said, 'even if they cut me off I'll still be able to do it'. It's something you do not want to take on, so move on."

Geoff Taylor, of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents record labels, says the government is right to consider "temporary suspension as a last resort, where accounts are repeatedly used illegally despite warnings".

"Most people across the music sector recognise the serious damage that illegal file-sharing is doing to investment in new music," he added.

But Patrick Rackow, chief executive of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, said sanctions would upset fans, rather than driving them towards legal services.

"The industry has to look forwards, not backwards," he said. "There is a huge problem here and we've got to find a solution to it. I don't know what this solution is, I don't think anyone does.

"There are more positive ways of dealing with this without totally upsetting your consumers."

He suggested that in the future, legal music download services could be based on radio. In that scenario, fans would not pay for every song but may pay a subscription or hear adverts, as with existing services such as Spotify or We7.

'Widespread concerns'

In its Digital Britain report, originally published in June, the government set a target to reduce file-sharing by 70% in the first year.

That report gave media regulator Ofcom until 2012 to consider whether "technical measures" - such as reducing broadband speeds or blocking access to download sites - were necessary.

However, according to a statement from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) released last month, that time-frame is now considered "too long to wait".

Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain, said in August: "We've been listening carefully to responses to the consultation this far, and it's become clear there are widespread concerns that the plans as they stand could delay action, impacting unfairly upon rights holders."

Speaking in response to the FAC's concerns, Mr Timm subsequently added that "any action would follow a clear series of warnings and there would be a fair and effective appeals process".

UK Music, an umbrella body representing the British music industry, said it was "pleased that government is proposing accelerated and proportionate action to meet their stated ambition of reducing illegal file-sharing".

"Throughout this debate, UK Music has voiced concerns that the original time-frame of proposed legislation, and particularly the trigger mechanisms that would grant Ofcom reserve powers to implement technical measures, would have failed to meet these ambitions," a statement said.