Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: December news about the NSA and its international partners
Tracking Devices (Also Known as Mobile Phones)
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The National Security Agency on Friday said its tracking of cellphones overseas is legally authorized under a sweeping U.S. presidential order.
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The NSA is tracking the locations of “hundreds of millions” of people worldwide using cellphone GPS. They said they weren’t in previous comments, but that was just one of many lies they got caught in. Now they’re defending it.
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It’s not surprising that they’re not mentioned, because when Ronald Reagan issued the order, in 1981, there were no cellular telephones in the United States, and there was no such thing as civilian GPS.
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The National Security Agency can inadvertently intercept mobile phone data revealing the location of U.S. citizens, the agency’s chief said.
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In 2006, the Montgomery Police Department used cellphone tower data to help convict a man who shot and killed a 30-year-old police officer in the head during a traffic stop.
Mario Woodward, 40, was charged with capital murder and then in 2008, sentenced to the death penalty by Montgomery County Circuit Judge Truman Hobbs. The officer, Keith Houts, left behind a wife and five children.
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Readers of this page are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
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The nation’s mobile phone carriers received more than 9,000 requests last year for cell-tower dumps, which identify every mobile phone at a particular location and time, often by the thousands.
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The National Security Agency isn’t the only government entity secretly collecting data from people’s cellphones. Local police are increasingly scooping it up, too.
Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA TODAY and Gannett newspapers and TV stations.
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The evolution of GPS and the smart-phone market has spawned a macabre industry of surveillance apps designed to be covertly installed onto the cellphones of vulnerable employees, business associates, partners and children.
Products such as Flexispy and Mobile Spy – allegedly used by hundreds of thousands of voyeurs – are chiefly marketed to paranoid parents and suspicious partners who want to invisibly monitor target phone activity – particularly real-time geo-location and call logs.
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Rene Obermann, who will end his seven-year spell as head of Germany’s big telecoms player at the end of the month, said in an interview that he doesn’t understand why everyone is “pussy-footing” around the U.S. on privacy issues.
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Privacy groups are asking regulators to discipline phone companies that sell subscriber information to third parties, including the CIA.
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Consumer advocates have asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to declare that AT&T violated a privacy rule in the Communications Act by selling phone records to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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Last week, AT&T sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that it will not disclose information about how it shares private data with the NSA. Reuters reports that Verizon is now taking a similar stance, but rather than challenging the proposal from its own shareholders by taking the necessary steps with the SEC, the wireless carrier plans to skip the vote all together if it can.
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The NSA may say that its phone surveillance efforts focus on metadata rather than the associated calls, but we now know that the agency can listen to many of those conversations whenever it wants. Documents leaked to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA can decode GSM-based cellphone calls without obtaining the encryption keys. The ability isn’t surprising when GSM has known weaknesses, but the document suggests that the NSA (and potentially other US agencies) can easily process cellphone calls worldwide. Not surprisingly, the intelligence branch argues that such cracking is necessary — folks on both sides of the law use encryption to hide information, after all. The NSA may not have such an easy time in the future, however. AT&T, T-Mobile Germany and other carriers worldwide are moving to tougher encryption methods for their GSM service, and 3G calls are typically more secure as a matter of course. These measures don’t prevent eavesdropping, but they do complicate any attempts to snoop on cellular chats.
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The National Security Agency can easily defeat the world’s most widely used cellphone encryption, a capability that means the agency can decode most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over public airwaves each day, according to published report citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
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Bruce Schneier, an information technology expert, wrote today “I think about this all the time with respect to our IT systems and the NSA. Even though we don’t know which companies the NSA has compromised — or by what means — knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost.”
Embassies
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The U.S. National Security Agency has been spying on Italian communications from installations on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Rome and the country’s consulate in Milan and even mounted an operation to capture information from inside the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C., the Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso claimed Friday.
Obama
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Twin bills to curb surveillance yet to pass committee stage but reformers pledge to fight anew when Congress returns next year
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But the more common practice when presidents mislead on cable news is for the broadcasters involved to neither revisit their answers nor correct false impressions they left. Leaving these particular remarks unchallenged does a disservice to MSNBC viewers as they try to understand the ongoing, high-stakes surveillance debate.
Canada
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The two biggest stories, however, have been about the journalists that have published the stories on the leaks. The first was regarding The Guardian, whose editor, Alan Rusbridger, was called in to testify to a Parliament committee about his paper’s reporting on the leaks. The paper’s staff could be charged with terrorism offenses related to their publication of the leaks.
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The U.S. National Security Agency considered spying on Canadians without the knowledge or consent of its intelligence partners in this country, according to a top-secret draft NSA directive.
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A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency.
The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries.”
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The CBC quotes an expert who predicts that the revelation will undermine Canada’s diplomatic standing and relations around the world (duh), and who speculates that the Prime Minister himself may have signed off on the arrangement.
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Drugs
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Technology has changed the surveillance state in ways that the American public doesn’t yet understand, according to Joel F. Brenner, a former senior counsel at the NSA.
“During the Cold War our enemies were few and we knew who they were. The technologies used by Soviet military and intelligence agencies were invented by those agencies,” he writes. “Today our adversaries are less awesomely powerful than the Soviet Union, but they are many and often hidden. That means we must find them before we can listen to them. Equally important, virtually every government on Earth, including our own, has abandoned the practice of relying on government-developed technologies. Instead they rely on commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, technologies. They do it because no government can compete with the head-spinning advances emerging from the private sector, and no government can afford to try.”
Antivirus
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Dear antivirus vendors: Are you aiding and abetting National Security Agency (NSA) spying?
Analysis/Overview
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But we want to focus on another angle: the unspoken assumption by the NSA that we need mass surveillance because “lone wolf” terrorists don’t leave as many red flags as governments, so the NSA has to spy on everyone to find the needle in the haystack.
But this is nonsense. The 9/11 hijackers were not lone wolves.
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The National Security Agency is breaking trust in democracy by breaking trust in the internet. Every day, the NSA records the lives of millions of Americans and countless foreigners, collecting staggering amounts of information about who they know, where they’ve been, and what they’ve done. Its surveillance programs have been kept secret from the public they allegedly serve and protect. The agency operates the most sophisticated, effective, and secretive surveillance apparatus in history.
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The FSF issued the following statement in response to the recent open letter on government surveillance published by AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo.
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We’ve seen less than 1% of the NSA documents Edward Snowden took with him from his employer, Booz Allen. The whistleblower had been employed to consolidate training documents used to brief NSA agents and contractors on the full range of NSA programmes and sources, which gave him access to the intimate (and sometimes boastful) details of the NSA’s capabilities.
The disclosures will keep coming, and they will be worse. The journalists handling the Snowden trove have taken extraordinary care to redact them in order to preserve the legitimate law-enforcement capabilities of western spy agencies, and there are certainly programmes of even grander sweep and more sensitive details that will take more time-consuming verification and caution before they can be disclosed.
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Six months ago this week, the Guardian and Washington Post published the first stories based on leaks from Edward Snowden. Since then, in what has become a steady drumbeat of revelations about the about the US National Security Agency other nations’ spy agencies, we’ve learned how utterly hostile our governments have become to our most fundamental rights in the post 9/11 world – but we’ve also seen the first genuine push-back by some of the people who have the power to make a near-term difference.
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What in principle would justify the scope of the surveillance revealed by the Snowden leak? Would it be enough, for example, if it could be shown that a specific potential act of terrorism had been prevented by, and could only have been prevented by, the full breadth and depth of what we now have learned is the playing field of the security services?
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On 20 May 2013, a diminutive and bespectacled computer specialist employed as a contractor by the American National Security Agency (NSA) boarded a plane to Hong Kong. He’d taken a leave of absence from work on the pretext of receiving treatment for his newly-diagnosed epilepsy, and bought a last-minute plane ticket at the airport, with no advance booking.
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Wyden told me, “The answer was obviously misleading, false.” Feinstein said, “I was startled by the answer.” In Washington, Snowden’s subsequent leaks created the most intense debate about the tradeoffs between national security and individual liberty since the attacks of September 11th. The debate will likely continue. According to Feinstein, Snowden took “millions of pages” of documents. Only a small fraction have become public. Under directions that the White House issued in June, Clapper declassified hundreds of pages of additional N.S.A. documents about the domestic-surveillance programs, and these have only begun to be examined by the press. They present a portrait of an intelligence agency that has struggled but often failed to comply with court-imposed rules established to monitor its most sensitive activities. The N.S.A. is generally authorized to collect any foreign intelligence it wants—including conversations from the cell phone of Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel—but domestic surveillance is governed by strict laws.
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Apologists for National Security Agency (NSA) espionage argue “national security!” But leaked NSA files show Washington spying to gain an advantage in economic negotiations and to keep a close eye not so much on terrorists as on political opponents and rivals.
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When the U.S. government figured that out, prosecutors came down hard, indicting him on multiple national security charges, including espionage, which, if convicted, could have earned him as much as 35 years in prison.
But Thomas Drake stood his ground. The U.S. government’s case collapsed on the eve of his trial.
In the process, he inspired Edward Snowden to follow his conscience, even if it meant breaking the law.
Today, Thomas Drake is quick to point out that over-reaching government surveillance isn’t a U.S. problem alone. That countries such as Canada … with its Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), is following Washington’s lead.
Mr. Snowden’s leaks have revealed that Canada allowed the U.S. to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the G8 and G20 summits in 2010 … spying that was closely coordinated with CSEC. And there are allegations that CSEC conducted industrial espionage in Brazil by targeting the country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy last year.
Petitions/Actions
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In the Utah desert, the U.S. government has built a secretive data centre, built to store much of the world’s electronic signals intelligence, a yottabyte’s worth of data. Members of Restore the Fourth are outraged.
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“Libraries are all about meta-data,” Alan Inouye, director of the Office for Information Technology Policy at ALA, told The Hill. As a library user, “you need to have some freedom to learn about what you think is important without worrying about whether it ends up in some FBI file. We’re talking about the information patterns of people. If that’s not personal, I don’t know what is.”
America’s libraries have been vulnerable to government intrusion ever since the passing of the Patriot Act (pdf) in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The law’s controversial Section 215, which allows the government to access business records, can be used to compel libraries to release data pertaining to research done by library users.
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Sympathy
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Morale at the US National Security Agency has plummeted since the Edward Snowden leak made international headlines and inspired an ongoing wave of criticism against the intelligence agency – news that coincides with the publication of more NSA documents.
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Former officials insist that employees are upset because President Obama hasn’t visited to show his support.
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There were no immediate reports indicating what may have caused the site to go down, but it comes less than two months after an hours-long Oct. 25 outage that was initially blamed on a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by a group such as the Anonymous hacktivist collective or a foreign government or another entity. A spokesperson for the NSA later stated that the website went down instead as a result of an “internal error,” but rumors persist that it actually came at the hands of a cyberattack, which would represent a major embarrassment for the high-tech agency.
Sweden
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Second, on Thursday Swedish television reported that Sweden’s signals intelligence agency, the FRA, has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership. A previous report said that Sweden is also a key partner of the GCHQ.
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It’s probably the single most enjoyable comment on the year’s NSA spying scandal. And it’s certainly the strangest.
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Anyone who took the time to read the UK government’s latest update on its cybersecurity strategy could be forgiven for thinking that a man called Edward Snowden never existed.
Most people who are even slightly plugged in to the world around them would agree, however, that we live in decidedly more interesting times for internet security and privacy than the document would have us believe. Not a day seems to have gone by since the summer without a new revelation of activities by the NSA or GCHQ that have gone just a little further than what most people find acceptable.
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I believe that there are some alternative answers to Sundberg’s quest, and that those are found 1) partly in main political parties of the Swedish establishment, and 2) partly in the economic-military establishment; 3) also the assisting role played by the Swedish state-owned media and MSM monopolies is paramount.
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After six months reporters Fredrik Laurin, Sven Bergman and Joachim Dyfvermark made contact with Glenn Greenwald who holds the documents that Edward Snowden leaked from American signal intelligence organization NSA. They made this report.
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Hungary
Bitcoin
Change
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There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.
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British Conservatives oppose video appearance by NSA whistleblower, which Green MEP says could happen this year
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The European Parliament has voted to formally invite former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to provide official court testimony on NSA spying, in the face of overwhelming concern from conservative MEPs.
European conservatives seemed reluctant to pay full attention to the possibility of the hearing on Wednesday. The European People’s Party (EPP), which is a conglomerate of center-right parties, had displayed a great deal of concern over the possibility of inviting Snowden for a hearing, suggesting that he could potentially throw the transatlantic trade agreement with the US into disarra
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Mission drift: our intelligence agencies are in danger of straying from their core purpose.
Australia
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The Australian government’s moves to suppress further exposures of its surveillance operations suffered a blow yesterday when it was revealed that three more whistleblowers have given statements to the East Timorese government about the illegal installation of bugging devices in the walls of Dili’s cabinet offices. The bugging involved Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agents posing as aid workers helping renovate Timorese government buildings.
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The Deep Packet Inspection technology is expected to go for a trial in February followed by a complete roll out in April
France
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Despite condemning US security agencies’ snooping on European citizens, France has passed a law which will grant its intelligence services the power to expand their own surveillance activity – with no judicial oversight.
In 2015, French agencies will gain the power to record telephone conversations, and access emails, location data and other electronic communications, for a wide range of reasons including national security and protecting France’s business interests. Internet companies and human rights groups opposed the new law, which places no legal oversight on the agencies.
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The promise of nude pictures of former French first lady Carla Bruni was used by hackers as bait to snare dozens of diplomats attending the G20 summit in Paris in 2011, it has emerged.
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The country hailed for its privacy laws is investing in drones to surveil its citizens
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Legality
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Privacy is not negotiable. What I am sending and who I am sending it to is not the government’s business unless they have evidence that I am doing something illegal. The debate is over. The government’s lies have been exposed and the people have found that they do not like what it is doing. We’ve talked long enough. Now we need action.
Misc.
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Western state sponsored espionage for economical reasons undermines free competition and contains a large portion of hypocrisy says journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has examined the entire material that Edward Snowden took with him from the NSA, and who has studied the documents regarding the Swedish espionage.
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Glenn Greenwald doesn’t want to abdicate, still willing to smash to smithereens the “toxic habits” of media. We met him in Rio for an exclusive interview.
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Virtual Worlds
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So it is that the NSA has been “playing” games for the last few years. Whether they’ve found any real enemy action is a question yet to be answered.
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NSA and GCHQ collect gamers’ chats and deploy real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life
[...]To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency’s impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.
That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Awards and Recognition
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The Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University has named the unfolding saga of digital spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) as the 2013 “Story of the Year.”
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There is a deeply misguided attempt to sacrifice Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond on the altar of the security and surveillance state to justify the leaks made by Edward Snowden. It is argued that Snowden, in exposing the National Security Agency’s global spying operation, judiciously and carefully leaked his information through the media, whereas WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond provided troves of raw material to the public with no editing and little redaction and assessment. Thus, Snowden is somehow legitimate while WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond are not.
“I have never understood it,” said Michael Ratner, who is the U.S. lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange and who I spoke with Saturday in New York City. “Why is Snowden looked at by some as the white hat while Manning, Hammond, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as black hats? One explanation is that much of the mainstream media has tried to pin a dumping charge on the latter group, as if somehow giving the public and journalists open access to the raw documents is irresponsible and not journalism. It sounds to me like the so-called Fourth Estate protecting its jobs and ‘legitimacy.’ There is a need for both. All of us should see the raw documents. We also need journalists to write about them. Raw documents open to the world give journalists in other countries the chance to examine them in their own context and write from their perspectives. We are still seeing many stories based on the WikiLeaks documents. We should not have it any other way. Perhaps another factor may be that Snowden’s revelations concern the surveillance of us. The WikiLeaks/Assange/Manning disclosures tell us more about our war crimes against others. And many Americans do not seem to care about that.”
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Prosecutors are warping the law to throw activist hackers like Aaron Swartz behind bars for years.
Branding
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President Obama is out to put the public’s mind at ease about new revelations on intelligence-gathering, but the Office for the Director of National Intelligence can’t quite seem to get with the program of calming everyone down.
Over the weekend, the ODNI was pumping up the launch of a new surveillance satellite launched by the National Reconnaissance Office. The satellite was launched late Thursday night, and ODNI’s Twitter feed posted photos and video of the launch over the following days.
Arizona
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Arizona Sen. Kelli Ward announced Monday that she will act to ban the National Security Agency from unconstitutional operations in her state. Ward describes her nullification legislation, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, as a pre-emptive strike against the embattled agency.
“While media attention is focused on a possible effort to shut off water to the NSA data center in Utah, I’m introducing the Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act to back our neighbors up,” Ward said, referencing actions by Utah’s privacy advocates to drive the agency from its borders.
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Cookies
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This week, new documents from NSA leaker Edward Snowden arrived with some troubling revelations: the NSA has been piggybacking on Google’s network, using the company’s “preferences” cookie to follow users from site to site, proving their identity before targeting them with malware. It means the agency has tapped into one of the most popular features on the web and the core of Google’s multibillion-dollar ad-targeting empire. Instead of just targeting ads and saving preferences, the infrastructure is being used to find people the NSA is interested in and silently infect their devices with malware.
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The already strained relationship between Google and the NSA has got a little bit worse, after claims in the latest Snowden leak that intelligence agencies are using the Chocolate Factory’s cookies to track targets.
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Twitter will start delivering targeted ads on mobile devices based on Web browsing data
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The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using “cookies” and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.
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The latest Snowden leak suggests US and UK cyberspies are taking advantage of Google’s proprietary cookie technology in an effort to track suspects.
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Nigeria
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While the House of Reps investigative panel dilly dallies on its planned investigations, the Internet Spy device will be installed and “Big Brother” will come alive, somewhere in Abuja, soon.
Recruitment
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The National Security Agency is hiring its spies early and recruiting teens as young as 15 for internships.
Students who answer ads seeking aspiring journalists have the chance to work as paid interns for the NSA in Fort Meade, Md.
The agency currently employs 500 young interns on staff, and according to an NSA spokeswoman in Newser, up to 95% of interns who want to stay on with the agency after their internships are able to do so.
Journalism
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Informing the American people about how their government spies on them can be risky business for journalists.
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China/Distractions/Deflections
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At stake is the trust of massive online audiences that attract digital advertising. As companies collect personal data and learn more about each user’s interests and habits, advertising becomes easier to sell. The marketing campaigns are particularly important to Google, Yahoo and Facebook, all of which make most of their money from ads. Although Microsoft and Apple make billions from the sale of software and devices, the two companies are also hitching their fortunes to Internet services.
UK
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A former British minister will today try to introduce a bill to tighten up the rules around the interception of communications by the security services to ensure there is judicial oversight of the material captured in this way.
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Shutting down secure email services because of surveillance agency interference apparently isn’t just a local phenomenon. Lavabit, Snowden’s email provider, shut down earlier this year to prevent being forced by the NSA to sabotage its own encryption. Silent Circle, another secure email service, shut down only hours later. Silent Circle hadn’t yet been pressured by the government, but obviously felt it was only a matter of time.
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Android/Gmail
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After we published the post, several people contacted us to say that the feature had actually been removed in Android 4.4.2, which was released earlier this week. Today, we installed that update to our test device, and can confirm that the App Ops privacy feature that we were excited about yesterday is in fact now gone.
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To date, there has been no way to run apps on Android with real and reliable privacy controls. Android version 4.3 and higher take a huge step in the right direction, letting users install apps while denying some of the apps’ attempts to collect the user’s data.
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As the flu subsides some, I feel ever so cranky and, hehe, suspicious. So I look askance at the newest Gmail changes and ask my favorite question: “Who benefits?” By product manager John Rae-Grant’s reckoning, you do. But Google gains more from plans to display remote images.
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How Gmail’s image tweak is a boon to marketers, stalkers, and debt collectors.
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Today, the web giant announced a change to its popular Gmail service: Images embedded in emails will now be automatically displayed, saving users from clicking on a “display images” link and, Google claims, making “your messages more safe and secure.” But buried in the fine print, a different picture emerges.
New Zealand
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A New Zealand court judge on Wednesday (11 October) affirmed that it is likely that Kim Dotcom and his family have been and continue to be under surveillance.
IBM
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An IBM shareholder is suing Big Blue, accusing it of hiding the fact that its ties to the NSA spying scandal cost it business in China – and wiped billions off its market value.
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IBM lobbied in favor of a bill that would allow it to share customers’ personal data, including data from customers in China, with the NSA, according to the complaint. In June, documents released by Snowden disclosed the NSA’s “Prism” surveillance program, which used information from technology companies such as IBM, the pension fund said.
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The White House has decided to maintain the “dual-hatted” arrangement which sees a single military officer head the National Security Agency eavesdropping service and US cyber warfare operations, an official said Friday.
Reform
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The draft report embraces recent suggestions that a civilian lead the NSA and that the agency be separated from Cyber Command, the military’s main cyberwarfare unit. When Cyber Command was launched in 2009, the Obama administration selected the director of NSA to also head the unit.
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It’s starting to look like the only part I got right last night might be this: “In the end, I suspect that most of this will amount to very little.”
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President Barack Obama’s administration said on Friday it will keep one person in charge of both the National Security Agency spy agency and the military’s Cyber Command, despite calls for splitting the roles after revelations about vast US electronic surveillance operations.
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Indications show that there is little effort on the part of the U.S. government to ease its use of “eavesdropping” and “data collection” archives according to many reports, but none more notable than one from the New York Times.
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Chris Inglis, the deputy director of the National Security Agency and its top civilian official, stepped down this week, according to an agency spokeswoman.
Fran Fleisch is now serving as the acting NSA deputy director, the agency’s No. 2 position. She had been the NSA executive director, which is the third-highest ranking post.
Amnesty Claims/CBS
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According to an interview on 60 Minutes scheduled for broadcast this coming Sunday, a top National Security Agency (NSA) official says that some in the government are considering giving amnesty to Edward Snowden in exchange for the return of all of the documents that he exfiltrated from the NSA.
According to CBS News, whose parent company produces 60 Minutes, NSA official Rick Ledgett told the news program that “it’s worth having a conversation about” possible amnesty for Snowden. Ledgett is in charge of the NSA’s unauthorized leak task force to investigate the Snowden leaks.
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The National Security Agency executives are reportedly in a split about the idea of providing amnesty to whistleblower Edward Snowden who revealed classified data about the controversial mass surveillance programmes by the US.
Very Recent
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According to an influential legal opinion in the European Court of Justice, the Directive breaches privacy rights and should be replaced with a new law.
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The National Security Agency has endured six months of criticism from media outlets since Edward Snowden released documents disclosing the agency’s massive global surveillance apparatus. With its back against the wall, NSA head Keith Alexander and Snowden task force head Richard Ledgett are speaking directly to the press as a means of getting ahead of the story, with the hope of painting themselves — and Snowden himself — in a new light.
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In recent months, the agency been taking preliminary steps—themselves dramatic for a signals intelligence agency—to engage the public debate. Tomorrow evening, for example, 60 Minutes will air a segment on NSA that reflects considerable cooperation with CBS.
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And now for your weekend Snowden update. Edward Snowden, as you may know if you haven’t been living in Plato’s cave, is the 30-year-old former NSA employee who stole and leaked “thousands” of documents revealing some of the incredible extent to which the NSA and other international spy agencies go to spy on Americans, Chinese, Germans, and the rest of the world. Last month the NSA said Snowden had leaked 200,000 documents to journalists. Now we’re hearing estimates from the NSA itself that Snowden is sitting on 1.5 million additional documents — but the agency admits even that figure is more-or-less a shot-in-the-dark.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Security at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
UEFI Forum operated by companies in bed with the NSA
Summary: NSA officials say that bricking a large number of PCs by tinkering with the boot process not just an imaginary plot
THE back doors in Windows are more than evident now, but Linux developers have just rewritten the random number generator, meaning perhaps that the NSA subverted the security of Linux by reducing entropy (e.g. via Red Hat staff, which is making requests for inclusion of NSA code in the core). This is troubling. As Phoronix put it (this debate has been going on for months now), “While /dev/random was made faster and more random in Linux 3.13, in light of the NSA controversies and that Intel/VIA hardware encryption and random generators may not even be trustworthy, there’s been a rework in how reseeding happens for the Linux kernel’s random component.”
We previously pointed out that using back doors the NSA can completely brick hardware, especially if it uses UEFI. Surely that’s a good reason to boycott UEFI, no?
Anyway, as part of a CBS puff piece (or propaganda piece where NSA gets the carte blanche and critics do not exist), there was an attempt to brick PCs using BIOS (causing irreversible destruction by sending packets). As the British press put it: “Senior National Security Agency (NSA) officials have told US news magazine program “60 Minutes” that a foreign nation tried to infect computers with a BIOS-based virus that would have enabled them to be remotely destroyed.”
We already know, based on a lot of evidence, that the NSA is in every way worse than other such agencies; in fact, there is nothing China or Russia, for example, can be accused of that the NSA/CIA cannot be accused of (not anymore anyway). The accusations from the NSA seem to be directed at China (popular scapegoat for NSA hypocrites as it is the biggest computer manufacturer), but given what we have seen when it comes to chip development at the design level (e.g. backdoor by useless encryption at hardware level), it is the US, especially criminal companies like Intel, that we should be concerned about. The government of the US has been compelling and at times bribing companies for back doors (the bribes come through the CIA though, not the NSA). Google is reportedly moving further away from Intel [1, 2], but will it also abandon the second processor in mobile devices (the Trojan horse that turns mobile phones into non-stop listening devices)?
For those who fail to grasp how criminal and void of ethics the NSA has become, in the next post we shall summarise some of the latest news. Don’t believe for a second the popular myth/fiction that China is worse when it comes to surveillance. █
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Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 2:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Corporations are still defining the problem with patents — wrongly — and then tackle the wrong problem so as to benefit themselves
Julie Samuels, who works for the EFF on behalf of billionaire Mr. Cuban (who invested in a patent troll, Vringo), continues to miss the point when it comes to patents. She focuses on trolls/fees rather than on software patents. “Today,” she writes, “EFF—along with Engine, the App Developers Alliance, and Public Knowledge—filed a brief asking the Supreme “Court to retain some sanity in the law and tighten up the rules around fee shifting. Fee shifting, sometimes called “loser pays,” is already in the Patent Act. While the statute currently says that “the court in exceptional cases may award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party,” the Federal Circuit has created a standard that makes this law essentially meaningless—fees are granted in but the smallest fraction of cases.””
Well, Apple is said to have “spent over $60 million on U.S. lawyers against Samsung”, which probably means that Samsung had to pay a similar amount. Apple has sued some other companies, notably HTC (which is how Apple’s litigious war on Android began). Reuters says that “Apple Inc has paid its leading outside law firm approximately $60 million to wage patent litigation against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in a California federal court, according to Apple legal documents filed late on Thursday.”
Also, according to this other report, “On Thursday, a Korean court ruled that Apple did not violate three Samsung patents related to messaging services. The Seoul Central District Court rejected Samsung’s request that Apple should pay 100 million won ($95,000) in damages, as well as a ban on sales of older iPhones and iPads.”
This shows that scope and patents themselves — not fees — are the problem. Apple’s patents are beyond ridiculous and they relate to software. Samsung’s patents, by contrast, are often hardware patents because Samsung is a hardware company (Apple is a branding company that integrates components from suppliers such as Samsung).
The bottom line is, in order to address the core problem we need to restore the debate’s focus on software patents, not size of litigant (e.g. troll) or the fees. Here is Linux Foundation staff (front for corporations) writing about Samsung and Apple in the context of FRAND (which to a lesser degree relates to fees, not patent scope). Updegrove writes: “Ever since Apple set off the mobile platform wars by suing Samsung for what Steve Jobs believed were egregious borrowings of patented Apple smartphone innovations, the courts have been busy processing the disputes. One of the most effective weapons the combatants made use of has been the so-called “standards essential patent” (SEP). And the armament of SEPS is very large, because each mobile device which implements many hundreds of standards. For example, if a company owns a SEP necessary to include a camera, wireless function or other key feature, the owner of the SEP can its price to license it, or even refuse to license it at all.
“That is, of course, unless the SEP owner was part of the standards setting organization (SSO) that developed the standard in question, and had made a commitment to license that SEP on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.”
Since huge corporations hijacked the debate about patents (and now fund the lawyers at the EFF to do the same) we have sort of lost hope when it comes to fixing the US patent system. Corporations do whatever the heck they want there. No wonder Professor Lessig, a copyright pioneer, sort of abandoned his copyright reforming efforts and now works hard to tackle political corruption in his country. Patents, like copyrights, have become a political problem. It’s all about money and those who have the money set the rules. The EFF spoke about software patents a year ago; it no longer speaks about it. Follow the money. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 2:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Analysis generally agrees that Microsoft is in serious trouble as Android continues to emerge as the de facto platform and not even zero-cost Windows will counter that
TODAY at PC World/Curry’s (UK) there were many people handling Android devices and hardly anyone around Windows devices (these shelves are unattended). The Vista 8 fiasco rendered Windows rather unwanted and unloved.
Microsoft’s Windows strategy is going nowhere and a belated writeup about Steve Ballmer leaving (leaving the software Mafia amid investigation of Microsoft’s practice of bribing governments) blames him for not moving along with the emerging trends. All Microsoft could do was use zero-cost tactics (e.g. in netbooks) and allegedly bribery too (negative cost). Now Microsoft considers giving Windows RT/Phone for free, showing its sheer antitrust hypocrisy. As USA Today put it, Microsoft is ‘Scroogling’ itself with attacks on Google. As the author points out: “That title belongs to Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign, which aims to turn the tide of public opinion against Google in the style of classic Washington DC attack politics.”
Charlie Demerjian, whom Microsoft offered to bribe in exchange for positive coverage of Vista (which he had strongly condemned), says that “Tablet OSes killed Windows 8 and Microsoft with it” [1]. “I said it before,” wrote Sosumi in our IRC channels (citing Demerjian), “scrap Metro and the NSA and while at it, also scrap the mobile aspirations and focus on making NT a great OS and on bringing the office tools to android, gnu/linux, etc… or they’ll eventually go under, which at this point isn’t bad either… one thing about surface tablets not selling is that major retailers are selling them at heavily discounted prices just to get rid of them” (true based on what I saw today at the store, where despite seemingly subsidised hardware customers remain apathetic towards Windows).
Bribery is not a sustainable strategy. It’s expensive, never mind illegal. In his latest GNU/Linux-bashing article (no link), Microsoft Jack boasts negative pricing as though it’s acceptable. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Windows has failed, PCs are dead, and the misery that is Windows 8 is to blame but why? There is one possibility that occurred to us that no SemiAccurate writer has seen posited yet, tablet OSes.
Lets go over a little history for those new to the game or who read sites that are afraid to lose ads if they point out the emperor has no clothes. That for the record would be most computer related sites, Microsoft spends a lot and that has direct influence on content. Go back and look at the wonderful reviews of Windows 8 especially how the big analyst houses had rosy forecasts, and how everyone with an ounce of common sense saw two trains speeding towards one another. You might want to go back and look at how a site promoted Windows 8 around launch and then retracted it when such abject BS was no longer tenable. Keep it in mind when you read their reviews and analyses, most sites nowadays are directly bought and paid for. Things like CNet’s Best of CES come to mind here.
From before day one SemiAccurate was critical of Windows 8 and Surface, we were the first to point out how serious ‘partner’ enmity was over that disaster was. Windows 8 can not compete in the tablet world for technical reasons, and will never be able to bridge the gap. Partners are in an even worse position, Windows tablets are financially untenable and they know it. With Windows 8, Microsoft has failed. When the numbers came out, they matched our predictions almost to the unit.
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