HBO is leaving no stones unturned in keeping Game of Thrones' piracy under control. The company is monitoring various popular torrent swarms and sending thousands of warnings targeted at internet subscribers whose connections are used to share the season 7 premiere of the popular TV series, reports TorrentFreak: Soon after the first episode of the new season appeared online Sunday evening, the company's anti-piracy partner IP Echelon started sending warnings targeted at torrenting pirates. The warnings in question include the IP-addresses of alleged BitTorrent users and ask the associated ISPs to alert their subscribers, in order to prevent further infringements. "We have information leading us to believe that the IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorization," the notification begins. "HBO owns the copyright or exclusive rights to Game of Thrones, and the unauthorized download or distribution constitutes copyright infringement. Downloading unauthorized or unknown content is also a security risk for computers, devices, and networks." Under US copyright law, ISPs are not obligated to forward these emails, which are sent as a DMCA notification. However, many do as a courtesy to the affected rightsholders. The warnings are not targeted at a single swarm but cover a wide variety of torrents. TorrentFreak has already seen takedown notices for the following files, but it's likely that many more are being tracked.

According to a report on TorrentFreak, an elaborate piracy phishing operating is tageting US ISPs and subscribers. Scammers are reportedly masquerading as anti-piracy company IP-Echelon and rightholders such as Lionsgate to send fake DMCA notices and settlement demands to ISPs. From the report:TorrentFreak was alerted to a takedown notice Lionsgate purportedly sent to a Cox subscriber, for allegedly downloading a pirated copy of the movie Allegiant. Under threat of a lawsuit, the subscriber was asked to pay a $150 settlement fee. This request is unique as neither Lionsgate nor its tracking company IP-Echelon is known to engage in this practice. When we contacted IP-Echelon about Lionsgate's supposed settlement offer, we heard to our surprise that these emails are part of a large phishing scam, which has at least one large ISPs fooled. "The notices are fake and not sent by us. It's a phishing scam," IP-Echelon informed TorrentFreak. For a phishing scam the fake DMCA notice does its job well. At first sight the email appears to be legit, and for Cox Communications it was real enough to forward it to their customers.U.S. law enforcement has been notified and is currently investigating the matter.

another random user writes "Kim Dotcom's internet connection was being diverted inside New Zealand weeks before the Government Communications Security Bureau says it started spying on him. The New Zealand Herald has obtained details showing Telecom engineers and staff at its technology services company Gen-I were investigating irregularities with his internet connection in November. The revelation has raised suspicion that Mr Dotcom was victim to earlier spying than the GCSB has admitted. It has brought fresh calls for an inquiry amid claims of the spy agency's role in the international 'Five Eyes' Echelon Network."

coondoggie writes "A group of international cyber cops is ramping up plans to fight online crime across borders. The unit, known as the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group, met this month in London and is made up of high-level online law enforcement representatives from the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. One of the main goals of the group is to fight cyber crime in a common way by sharing intelligence, swapping tools and best practices, and strengthening and synchronizing their respective laws."

HopeSeekr of xMule writes "Perhaps as one of the first high profile uses of Alexa's WebSearch Platform, the U.S. government plans to search, link and reference every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations. Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes. Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images with tech recently used at the Superbowl."

Whispering Bob writes "Techworld has got an interesting article on the technology behind the Echelon spying networks run by the US, UK, Cananda and Australia. Apparently the super storage and analysing technology used in the US is sold by privately owned Texas Memory Systems. It can deal with one trillion floating point operations per second. Now that's some technology."

jfruhlinger writes "An article on Security.ITWorld.com seems to outline a coming information arms race. The European Union has decided to respond to the Echelon project by funding research into supposedly unbreakable quantum cryptography that will keep EU data out of Echelon's maw. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible, the political implications are troubling, indicating a widening rift within the Western world. Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors."

An anonymous reader writes "Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations. Among the groups targeted by Operation Fastlink are well-known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X, all of which specialized in pirating computer games, and music release groups such as APC. The enforcement action announced today is expected to dismantle many of these international warez syndicates and significantly impact the illicit operations of others."

Aaron writes "The Center for Democracy and Technology offers up an interesting point for point rebuttal to the the claims made via the 'rah-rah-esque' DOJ's website, part of the PR campaign (including Ashcroft speaking tours) to convince the public the Act is good for them. I think this Broadband Reports article also brings up a good point: among the groups attacking the Act, why do so few of them bring up Echelon? It already gives the government much of the surveillance ability they claim they're lacking, and without congressional oversight. The UN this year even launched an investigation into the use of the system to spy on UN diplomats without much fanfare."

An anonymous reader writes: "UPI columnist James C. Bennett says that governments are going to spy no matter what. So he suggests that it would be better to admit that Echelon exists, and formulate some reasonable guidelines on such spying, than to pretend that it doesn't and let governments go about their business without any scrutiny. Interesting suggestion. But who will watch those watchers? And who will watch them? "

CrossRhythm writes: "The European Commission Resolution on Echelon encourages the Commission and Member States "to promote software projects whose source text is made public", to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category," and "systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm"."

We've been deluged with Echelon stories today, although as far as I can tell, there was no real news about it whatsoever. The committee examining Echelon met today, and that was apparently enough of an excuse for news agencies to report stories based on the draft report that was leaked last week. (The final report isn't due to be presented until September - it doesn't appear that today's committee meeting actually released anything.) News stories from here and there: CNN, BBC, Computerworld... well, I'll skip the non-English ones. And if you're wondering what this "Echelon" thing is, there's a handy guide.

wiredog writes "The EU report on the NSA/GCHQ/et al echelon system is up at cryptome" This is a fairly lengthy piece covering a lot of stuff relating to the feasibility of intercepting transmissions, Cryptography, Privacy and more.

loosenut writes: "The American Civil Liberties Union has purchased an ad to appear in the New York Times on April 15th and April 16th, as reported on their web page. The ad reads "Now equipped with 3-way calling. You, whoever you're dialing, and the government." Will the threat of having cell phones tapped be enough to mobilize people against Echelon?" I doubt it. But it's a good effort.

Haralambos Geortgilakis writes "In what might be a New Years spasm of sanity, the police & local Echelon goons are in the "official," public spotlight. That "swooshing" sound, is the aforesaid goons diving for the power switch.... Here's the New Zealand Herald story."

Yet another anonymous reader sends the following: "Dr. Dobb's Technetcast is carrying an informative presentation about the Echelon intelligence gathering system by Duncan Campbell an investigative reporter who wrote one of the first reports about the system in 1988."

belbo writes: "The German newsservice Heise reports that Ilka Schroeder, member of the European Parliament, has instituted legal proceedings at two German courts over 'unknown persons in the U.S., the UK and the German government operating and / or tolerating the espionage system ECHELON, thus violating several patent protection laws'."

A reader writes "PGP's creator is participating in an online interview this week. Phil is mainly interested in clearing the air about the recently discovered ADK bug, but the larger topics of encryption and worldwide organized snoop rings (Echelon) have already come up. The interview is open to questions from anyone; runs through Friday 9/8."

kris writes "German magazine Telepolis has an article by Duncan Campbell about Inside Echelon. The article gives a nice overview about what Echelon is and how it came to be. This article is available in a German Version as well." Somewhat lengthy, and written with an agenda, but very interesting. Although I have to say it's wierd seeing banner ads in german ;)

Anonymous Coward writes "Proposals for a new definition of human rights now before the European Parliament, writes Duncan Campbell in Telepolis, would ban ECHELON and update data protection rules to latest developments in telecommunications technology." Compare and contrast to the United States, where the only legislative proposals before Congress are to increase government spying on the citizenry. Hey, the FBI says "If there's going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI." What more is there to say?