Puzo Family Fires Back at Studio in "Godfather" Suit

New York City - The estate of "The Godfather" author Mario Puzo has fired back at movie studio Paramount Pictures with a $10 million counterclaim over Paramount's attempts to block a new book in the Mafia saga.

Lawyers for the estate of Puzo also sought to end Paramount's rights to the 1969 best-seller, which went on to become an Oscar-winning movie released by the studio.

"Mario Puzo brought vast wealth to Paramount at a time when they desperately needed it. Now that he's gone, Paramount's trying to deprive his children of the rights he specifically reserved," Bertram Fields, an attorney for the Puzo family, said in a statement on Tuesday.

"I promised Mario I'd protect his kids from this kind of reprehensible conduct. Paramount wanted a war, and they're going to get one - only the stakes will be much higher than they thought," Fields added.

Paramount filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court in February that accused Puzo's heirs of approving sequels to "The Godfather" without the studio's permission and in violation of earlier agreements.

A third book "The Family Corleone" is due to be published in May. It is billed as an all-new prequel to "The Godfather" set in New York in 1933.

The counterclaim, filed on Monday, said Puzo's estate had informed Paramount several times of the upcoming publication of "The Family Corleone" and noted that the movie studio had not objected to the book "The Godfather's Revenge" in 2006.

Moreover, the estate said, Puzo received only "minimal payment" from Paramount for the rights to "The Godfather" and that the agreement at the time excluded rights to any further books that include the characters from "The Godfather" in new and different situations.

"The Puzo Estate, representing the children of Mario Puzo, needs no permission from Paramount to use the title of their father's novel or to publish a sequel novel or to use what Paramount claims are 'the Godfather works'," the counterclaim said.

Attorneys asked the court to terminate the rights of Paramount to the original "The Godfather" book and asked for $10 million in damages.

Paramount could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Mario Puzo died in 1999. The two sequels to the story of the Corleone Mafia family that have been published since his death were written by U.S. author Mark Winegardner, and the forthcoming third novel is written by Ed Falco.

Irish Hacking Suspect Freed in Wake of FBI Sting

By Shawn Pogatchnik

Dublin -  An Irish computer hacker accused of breaking into the email account of Ireland's top cybersecurity cop, then using its contents to eavesdrop on American and British anti-hacking detectives, was released without charges Wednesday.

Irish police said they were preparing a new evidence file for state prosecutors to use against Donncha O Cearbhaill. He's been arrested and released once before over alleged hacking attacks in Ireland last year.

FBI affidavits identified the 19-year-old Trinity College chemistry student as the Internet infiltrator responsible for recording and posting online a Jan. 17 trans-Atlantic conference call between American and British anti-hacking detectives.

The U.S. District Court in Manhattan, acting on FBI affidavits, issued indictments Tuesday against O Cearbhaill, two Britons, another Irishman and a Chicago man over their alleged role in a string of cyber attacks on several U.S. agencies and companies committed by an Anonymous hacker subgroup called Lulz Security, or LulzSec. The FBI built its case using the hackers' alleged leader, Sabu, as a turncoat informant who drew out incriminating online admissions from the others.

Hackers claiming allegiance to the amorphous Anonymous movement offered a defiant reply Wednesday by defacing dozens of Web sites connected to Internet defense firm Panda Security. The Anonymous activists justified their attacks citing Panda's links to law enforcement. The Bilbao, Spain-based company said its main site wasn't compromised.

Hackers from Anonymous also said they knocked out the Vatican's Web site Wednesday afternoon in a broad protest against Catholic doctrine, past and present, as well as the chronic cover-up of child abuse by clergy.

O Cearbhaill walked free from Terenure police station in south Dublin after a 24-hour interrogation period, the maximum permitted under Irish law for suspected hacking crimes.

Such releases are typical in Ireland, where state prosecutors can take months, even years, to mull whether to file charges.

He made no public comments following his release. His father John Carroll, a councilman in rural County Offaly, also declined comment.

The other Irish citizen indicted, Galway university student Darren Martyn, remained free Wednesday and conversed freely with followers on his Twitter account, in which he describes himself as a reformed "blackhat," slang for a criminal hacker.

Martyn said the FBI had got his age wrong — he's also just 19, not 25 — and he intended to keep working on his own Internet and school projects in expectation of potentially imminent arrest. He declined AP requests for an interview.

The U.S. court has indicted Martyn on two counts of hacking, with a potential 10-year prison sentence for each count, while O Cearbhaill faces one count of hacking and one count of disclosing an unlawfully intercepted wire communication, offenses that combined carry a maximum 15-year sentence.

Irish police arrested both O Cearbhaill and Martyn in September after their online noms de guerre claimed responsibility for a hacking attack on the Web site of Fine Gael, the major political party in Ireland's government. They were both released and files of evidence prepared for their potential prosecution, but they have yet to be charged over the Fine Gael attack.

According to the affidavit by FBI Special Agent George Schultzel, O Cearbhaill decided to crack the email codes of his recent police captors.

While Schultzel doesn't identify them by name, he testified that O Cearbhaill was able to crack into the private email accounts of two detectives in the Irish police's Computer Crime Investigation Unit, including its commander — and found a security gold mine because both detectives had been forwarding security-sensitive emails from their police accounts.

The FBI said it seized records of both Irish detectives' email accounts and found they'd been illegally accessed 146 times.

The affidavit reports that O Cearbhaill told his LulzSec contact Sabu Jan. 9 he had "just got into the iCloud for the head of a national cybercrime unit. I have all his contacts and can track his location 24/7." In a footnote, Schultzel identifies O Cearbhaill's target as the Irish police's cybercrime supervisor.

The Associated Press requested an interview Wednesday with the Computer Crime Investigation Unit's director, Detective Inspector Paul Gillen. He and the police force declined the request, citing their ongoing investigation.

The FBI affidavit suggests Gillen shipped a key email from the FBI — listing the invited officials and phone passwords for their Jan. 17 conference call — from his police email account to his private one.

The 15-minute discussion, and the list of security officials, both were leaked on to the Internet. In one telling moment, an FBI official asked about progress on investigating the two Irish hackers, O Cearbhaill and Martyn: "Is anyone on from Ireland?" Silence followed.

Internet security experts said they found it hard to believe that the head of a nation's cybersecurity unit would ship such a sensitive email to a poorly protected private account, then not bother to participate in the conference call.

"It's obviously deeply embarrassing," said Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for data security company Sophos. "It's a boo-boo. I would hope that more sensitive information isn't being shared via his personal account."

Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested by Adam Martin

New York City - Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act, but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream, the real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody.
  The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.

In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.

If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.

But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.

Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick, Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:

There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.

In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer." By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.