11.26.13
Posted in Action at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Death not by stoning but by burning
Summary: How oil and coal (as shown above) contribute to the death of poor people who are hardly a factor in the agenda of oil and coal profiteers
SOME of the world’s poorest people are needlessly dying and based on what governments in developed nations are doing, “radical” action might be needed [1] (of course those governments will try to lock up those who do something about it). Victims of the climatic changes [2] are getting glued to a corner and in low GDP nations, where infrastructure for energy is poor (by design, for economic reasons), it should not be shocking to encounter many more violent deaths [3]. There actually are viable alternatives to it all. But those who profit from oil and coal won’t allow them to be embraced; they use governments to suppress clean energy. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The world has been rapidly approaching a crossroads not only on climate change but also on mass extinction, destruction of the oceans, poisoning of the air, land and water and deteriorating food quality and security. A global revolt has been building and after this week in Poland, another reason to explode against the world’s richest governments has been provided. It is time for a world-wide environmental justice revolt.
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A group of 133 developing nations have walked out of a key part of the climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, amidst a conflict over how countries who have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases should be held financially responsible for some of the damage caused by extreme weather in nations with low carbon emissions. The United States, Australia, Canada and other industrialized countries are pushing for the issue — known as loss and damage — to be put off until after the 2015 climate talks in Paris.
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Posted in Action at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: A roundup of news about privacy and the NSA in particular
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[Symantec does not have a good record on Linux]
Security researchers of well-known security firm ‘Symantec’ have identified a cyber-criminal operation which relies on a new-fangled Linux backdoor, nicknamed Linux.Fokirtor, to embezzle data without being discovered.
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[ORG at the start of the month]
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[And from September, too]
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The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable.
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Ruth from the Open Rights Group sez, “With the huge amount of evidence leaked by Edward Snowden on surveillance by the NSA and the GCHQ, the Open Rights Group has compiled a list of the top 6 points that everyone should know about how their rights have been violated. To combat this tide of privacy-invasions ORG also list the 6 key things that they want to do in response, and how you can help the biggest year of campaigning against mass surveillance. We believe that if enough people speak up we can change how surveillance is done.”
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Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) collectively filed an amicus curae brief for a lawsuit filed against the NSA, claiming that its record collection violated the Fourth Amendment.
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[Espionage and corporate interests served, as many feared]
A newly released report from the watchdog group Essential Information alleges that powerful corporations spy on and sabotage the very nonprofit groups dedicated to keeping them in check.
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They are called smart TVs, but they could be doing more than being that smart and intelligent TV in your living room or game room.
A report published on DoctorBeet’s Blog, revealed that the author’s new LG Smart TV was calling home, sending detailed information about the author’s viewing habits to a (remote) LG server and using that information to display targeted ads on the Smart TV’s Smart Landing Screen. LG calls the program Smart Ads.
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The US National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying scandal could have a deep impact on US business prospects in China, where security concerns threaten to weigh down on the demand for American products.
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Early in November of this year, The New York Times quoted an agency boast that when Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary general, visited President Barack Obama at the White House last April, the president found before him a secretly intercepted copy of the U.N. head’s talking points (as if Obama might not have guessed what they would be). The agency on its internal broadsheet listed this as the week’s “operational highlight.”
Unlike in 2001, the NSA now has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 employees worldwide (its assistant director, John C. Inglis, jokingly estimated in 2012 that the number of current employees was “between 37,000 and 1 billion.”)
But the question to be asked of any bureaucracy is what it actually does. We know now that the NSA purloins (presumably electronically, but who knows?) other people’s mail. It undoubtedly, with its billions, can employ some second-story men, as well as those who service its giant antennae — or read your e-mails or copy out your Facebook page. But why do they bother? That is the fascinating question.
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The U.S. government “really blew it” on conducting surveillance programs that riled foreign leaders and domestic skeptics, Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a television interview.
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[Well, because everyone knows that Skype is a spy anyway]
Luxembourg’s data protection authority cleared Microsoft and its subsidiary Skype of data protection violations related to the U.S. National Security Agency’s Prism spying program, the agency said Monday.
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[Clearly not very factual and generally not a good article overall]
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New declassifed documents show legal arguments over bulk metadata collection.
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Twitter has implemented new security measures that should make it much more difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on communications between its servers and users, and is calling on other Internet companies to follow its lead.
The company has implemented “perfect forward secrecy” on its Web and mobile platforms, it said Friday. The technology should make it impossible for an organization to eavesdrop on encrypted traffic today and decrypt it at some point in the future.
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Civil liberties advocates on Friday asked a federal court in New York to end the National Security Agency counterterrorism program that collects data on billions of phone calls by Americans, arguing that it violates the Constitution and was not authorized by Congress.
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A federal judge on Friday appeared receptive to the idea that Americans enjoy some level of privacy in their phone records, in the first court challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data from telecommunications companies.
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The U.S. Supreme Court will not intervene to stop the National Security Agency’s domestic telephone surveillance program — for now.
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The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would not review a ruling by the secretive intelligence court that gave the government access to records kept by Verizon Communications Inc on millions of telephone calls.
The long-shot case was brought to the high court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research organization. It was the first time the high-profile issue has come before the justices since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began in June to leak secret documents detailing American surveillance programs.
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Now that the extent of the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has been exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it’s beholden on the public to fight back or else find themselves “complicit” in the activities, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
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To say that there are a lot of people who are angry with the National Security Agency right now would be an understatement. But the things that are getting the most political attention right now—such as the invasion of the privacy of American citizens and spying on the leaders of American allies—are just a fraction of the problem, according to cryptographer and Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow Bruce Schneier.
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Speaking at a presentation in DC, Bruce Schneier nailed the strategic cost of allowing the NSA to sabotage Internet security through BULLRUN: it has cost the US government all credibility as a contributor to Internet governance.
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[The progressive Australian politicians speak out]
“We don’t discuss intelligence matters,” Australia’s bewildered prime minister told the media again this morning, making him the only person left on earth not discussing intelligence matters. Seven months after the fuse was lit, the scandal of the US National Security Agency surveillance state has finally detonated in Australia.
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Indonesia has recalled its envoy to Canberra over reports that Australia spied on phone conversations of the Indonesian president, his wife and other high-ranked government officials.
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A double blow for Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono this week. First it emerged his personal cell phone was being tapped by a foreign spy agency.
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Requests from governments worldwide for user information have more than doubled since three years ago. Worse still, says Google, is what the US won’t let us tell you.
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Ex-lord chancellor defends Guardian reporting of Snowden files and says he’s sceptical of warnings from spy agency chiefs
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European and US justice officials have agreed to work towards “restoring trust” after the NSA scandal. The EU’s Viviane Reding told DW she saw signs of an “absolutely new” attitude to Europeans’ privacy.
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Today, I do not use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or any other social network. I didn’t delete my accounts (impersonators really suck), but I’m logged out and radio silent across the board.
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Following months of Snowden disclosures, the extent to which the National Security Agency’s extraordinary surveillance infringes on the privacy of our communications and other vast areas of our lives has become widely apparent. Far less appreciated, however, is the global threat that the NSA’s spying poses to freedom of expression over the Internet.
The NSA’s seemingly limitless prying into our personal electronic data is predicated on a cramped vision of our right to privacy. As I have described in this space these intrusions are facilitated by various shortcomings in current US law. For instance, the law recognizes a privacy interest in the contents of our communications, but not in what is known as our metadata, the electronic details about whom we communicate with, what we search for online, and where we go. The rationale, stated in a 1979 US Supreme Court ruling, is that we have no privacy interest in the phone numbers we dial because we share them with the phone company, even though the court could just as easily have ruled that the phone company has a fiduciary duty to respect the privacy of its customers.
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Fisa court judge who authorised massive tapping of metadata was hesitant but felt she could not stand in the way
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The relentless migration to the cloud requires strong encryption. Customers will demand it — and snooping will be deterred
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Norway’s intelligence services have admitted collecting details of over 33 million phone calls involving the country’s citizens during a month-long period between December 2012 and January this year. The data was shared with the U.S. signals intelligence agency, the NSA.
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As more NSA-related documents are forced out into the public eye, the narrative contained within the court opinions is at odds with the NSA’s continuous declarations that utmost care has been taken to prevent violating the privacy of Americans.
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[From weeks ago]
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has vowed that the NSA won’t be allowed to get away with its nefarious surveillance of the internet any more … as soon as 1,100 boffins can agree on a PRISM-proofing plan.
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It’s understandable that the guards standing outside the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt are a little nervous. The building used to house the U.S.’s largest military hospital. Now it looks more like a fortress with its high walls, barbwire, antitank barriers, security cameras and guards with machineguns. But is it really an offense to stand in front of the building here, on the sidewalk? Or, better put, does a dawdling passer-by really necessitate two police cars and American security officers? Really?
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Lavabit’s founder has claimed other secure webmail providers who threatened to shut themselves down in the wake of the NSA spying revelations had received court orders forcing them to stay up.
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It has been announced this week by PiCloud and Dropbox that it is has acquired PiCloud the platform which specialises in high performance computing, as well as batch processing and scientific computing applications from the cloud.
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A new project seeks to lay down some ground rules for what could become a cloud for the continent.
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While there’s been so much attention lately on the NSA’s surveillance tactics and its legality, for years there’s been a separate issue that we’ve been covering: the outdated ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) rules (written in the ’80s) that cover law enforcement’s ability to get access to your data, such as emails. The laws make almost no sense today, as they were written in a time when the internet was much more limited. The idea of everyone storing pretty much all of their information and communications online wasn’t even a concept at the time — and that creates bizarre and nonsensical rules, like arguing that emails that have been on a server for more than 180 days are considered “abandoned” and no warrant is needed to view them.
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The DNI’s recent document dump has sprung loose an April 2009 “notification memorandum” from the NSA, which provides updates on its “end-to-end” reviews of both the Section 215 (phone metadata) and the Section 402 (email metadata) bulk records collections. As was noted in earlier posts, both programs were suspended by the FISA court because of the NSA’s routine abuse FISA Act limitations.
The declassified document is addressed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). There’s no indication this information was also disseminated to the House Intelligence Committee, but perhaps that will surface in the future. The memo spends a few introductory paragraphs detailing the efforts the NSA has made to clean up its act before delving into more interesting details — including the limitations placed on the Section 215 collection by the Judge Walton, as well as a new problem it uncovered during its 60-day “end-to-end” reviews.
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We’ve written a few times about the latest document dump by James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week, in which they declassified a large pile of documents (after being told to by the courts — though they don’t mention that part). But, one of the odder parts was that the dates were redacted on certain legal filings, such as the FISA Court order by judge Reggie Walton smacking the NSA around a bit for not complying with the law.
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Yesterday, we wrote about the DOJ responding to a FISA Court order that it declassify a FISA Court ruling on the interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (related to the bulk collection of metadata), in which the DOJ effectively told the court that it wasn’t going to obey.
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Intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind seeks explanation of deal that allowed US to ‘unmask’ Britons
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American intelligence agencies were given permission to track phone calls, emails and internet records of British citizens in a secret deal struck with UK officials, it has been claimed.
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Ordinary Britons may have had their phone and email records monitored by US surveillance teams, it has been claimed.
British intelligence officials reportedly paved the way for the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on unwitting and innocent citizens, a memo leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden has suggested.
It is believed that in 2007 a deal was reached to give the green light to the NSA to hold and analyse information about British citizens that it previously did not have access to.
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On Wednesday, The Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News revealed what most suspected by this point: the monitoring of vast swathes of the British populace. In 2007, then-prime minister Tony Blair allowed a change in the intelligence agreement between the U.K. and the U.S., permitting the Americans to record British citizens’ phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, so as to map who communicates with whom. It is extremely unlikely that this data is not shared with the British authorities.
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Approved plans made by British intelligence officials reportedly allowing the phone, internet and email records of ordinary UK citizens to be analysed and stored by the US National Security Agency is a “sell out” of privacy, according to Big Brother Watch.
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Intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind seeks explanation of deal that allowed US to ‘unmask’ Britons
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A secret court’s backwards logic opened the floodgates for the NSA to gather metadata. We’re still feeling the repercussions
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Russia’s largest internet company is expanding into the US, trying to lure customers by keeping the data from its services offshore.
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Shareholders urge the telecom giants to be more transparent about U.S. data demands
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Some shareholders in Verizon Communications and AT&T are pushing to know what the telecom companies have told U.S. or foreign agencies about their customers, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Wednesday.
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Iceland’s attempts to become a free-speech haven risk floundering in the wake of revelations regarding the extent of internet monitoring by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) has spent the last three years working protections for whistleblowers and investigative journalists into the country’s constitution. But the knowledge that monitoring of digital communications is far more widespread than previously thought makes it difficult to promise safety to sources who might have hoped otherwise.
“When we were making IMMI, even if we were aware that there had been spying going on, on all our devices, I don’t think any of us at the time – late 2009, early 2010 – anticipated that it was so invasive,” says Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of the driving forces behind the initiative.
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Back when Yahoo was something hollered at a rodeo and no one could conceive of Googling anything, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order that extended the power of US intelligence agencies overseas, allowing broader surveillance of non-US suspects. At the time, no one imagined he was granting authority to spy on what became known as Silicon Valley.
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But Jameel Jaffer, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a judge in federal court: “If you accept the government’s theory here, you are creating a dramatic expansion of the government’s investigative power.”
US District Court Judge William Pauley reserved decision on an ACLU request to halt the National Security Agency surveillance programmes pending the outcome of its lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s administration.
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DHS I&A DSAC Records Illuminate Aspects of Federal Public-Private Intelligence Partnership: Wikileaks, Anonymous, Booz Allen Hamilton, Career CIA Officers at DHS Domestic Intelligence Office
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There’s a spot of skulduggery going on in the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a lot of questions are being asked about why the worshipful judges have, at least publicly, demanded a trial in Europe for Saif el-Islam al-Gaddafi – son of the late Muammar – but have blithely accepted that the dictator’s ruthless security boss, Abdullah al-Senussi, should be tried in the militia-haunted chaos of Libya.
Was this because the court didn’t want to upset Libya’s anarchic authorities by insisting that it try both men at The Hague? Or is there an ulterior, far more sinister purpose: to prevent Senussi blurting out details in The Hague of his cosy relationship with Western security services when he was handling relations between Gaddafi, the CIA and MI6?
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Mansur Mahsud of the FATA Research Center told the Bureau: ‘Yesterday Nawaz Sharif’s foreign minister gave a statement saying it would not carry out drone strikes during talks between militants and the government, and the very next day a drone strike took place in the settled area. It will increase tension and anger in Pakistan against America.’
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Two major military-related groups, Officers of Russia and Soldiers’ Mothers, have addressed the Nobel Committee with a request to evaluate the inhumane statements made by the US president about drone warfare.
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Drones are in effect terrorist tools that impose terror on the people that they are fired against, creating more enemies for the United States with every innocent person that is killed, Leah Bolger, president of Veterans for Peace, told RT.
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The revolving door goes both ways, according to Newsweek, since most corporate executives “love hanging out” with the agency’s top spies, seeking to maintain influence in Capitol Hill.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an infographic list showing the Web service providers that encrypt or don’t encrypt their users data as it traverses the Internet.
The list derives from the foundation’s Who Has Your Back Program, which surveys Web service providers to find out if they are implementing the foundation’s best practices for encryption.
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Snowden revelations shed light on facts that force us to ask ourselves important questions and to take action that might be essential for the future of our online societies and for the very structure of our political systems.
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Ever since the Snowden leaks began, there’s been a clear dichotomy in terms of how different industries have reacted. The various big internet companies, which were named early on as participants in the PRISM program, have been quite vocal (sometimes to profane levels) that they were not willing participants in most of these programs, and are currently involved in an important lawsuit arguing that they have a First Amendment right to reveal how much info they actually share with the government. While those eventual revelations (and they almost certainly will come out, either legally or through leaks) may reveal certain companies were more complicit than others, by all indications, the various internet companies have been very willing to fight the government over this.
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[Amsterdam has top secret NSA documents]
According to new documents provided by the National Security Agency’s favorite foe, former employee-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad is reporting that the NSA has infected more than 50,000 computer networks with malware in a process known as “Computer Network Exploitation.”
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The US National Security Agency placed malicious software on more than 50,000 computer networks around the world, says a report based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
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The US National Security Agency has employed more than a thousand IT specialists to hack into 50,000 computer systems worldwide and to install malicious software designed to steal sensitive information, a media report has said.
In addition to its massive monitoring and collection of telephone and Internet data, the US intelligence agency has been extensively infiltrating computer systems around the world and planted malware, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported on Saturday.
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Since the revelations of NSA snooping started to emerge this summer, they have gotten a lot of mileage in the media and across the internet, but I think it is fair to say that life in the City barely missed a step.
There were some suggestions of qualitatively negative consequences, but when you work in the finance industry you get used to unspecific bluster.
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Get the IOC – IBM, Oracle, Cisco – out of China, we heard several times.
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Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.
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The deputy director of the National Security Agency on Friday sounded skeptical about permitting the FBI, DEA or other law enforcement agencies to directly search through the NSA’s vast data troves, as a new bill would appear to permit.
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TreasureMap is not a document but viewing software — very similar to MindMeister, see below — that draws (and updates) network diagrams according to what is currently carried in an associated database. The key feature is scalability: vector graphics that zoom in and out to any level of resolution. Sort of like Google Earth, only using lines and nodes.
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Google, the giant of the Internet, thought about moving its servers out of the U.S. after the NSA debacle, said Eric Schmidt, the company’s chairman, on Friday at the Paley International Council Summit in New York.
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As the Senate Armed Forces Committee works on the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va) sees it as a good opportunity to try again to pass cybersecurity legislation. He has submitted the Cybersecurity Act of 2013, legislation passed in the Senate Commerce Committee this summer after the failure of CISPA to gain momentum.
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The Department of Defense’s budget is funded with the annual passage of The National Defense Authorization Act. With each year’s passing Congress adds more provisions to the law, compounding the already controversial nature of its intent. In 2012, Congress added Sections 1021 and 1022 to the bill, which codified the indefinite military detention without charge or trial of citizens for the first time in American history.
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11.25.13
Posted in Action at 5:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Assassinations without trial, or “drone strikes” as the corporate press commonly calls them, are becoming more controversial
AS PROMISED yesterday, today we tackle the subject of predator drones (UAVs) again. It is no longer relegated to daily links; there is a lot of commentary worth making now that we know about the NSA’s role (cracking computers and using back doors) in assassinating people, based on lists it gathers. It has a lot to do with technology, and by technology we mean even software, not just aviation and physics/chemistry (producing explosives for Hellfire missiles). The NSA helps tracking targets by their devices that they carry and it also helps select targets, based on who they communicate with, what Web pages they visit, etc. The NSA has already participated in the assassination of thousands of people this way. Those who want us to naively believe that all those people deserved this punishment should read [1] and those who think that US citizens support it should read [2]. Most US citizens still have compassion [3], but not the corporate media which calls each person dead “militant” (meaning adult male) as if to blindly justify each assassination. Germany has just quit what might be perceived as complicity [4] and in Pakistan, where the NSA participated in thousands of murders, Imran Khan (a friend of Wikileaks) leads protests [5,6] which include, potentially, blocking of NATO [7]. Techrights will continue to cover such news because now we know the large degree to which software plays a role (mostly tracking), never mind the drones' embarrassing use of Linux. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Why do you trust that this secretive government is only killing “people who need to be killed”?
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Anti-drone activists will march from the White House to the headquarters of drone aircraft manufacturer General Atomics on Friday ahead of a rally to “discuss strategies to stop the proliferation of drones” used for military purposes around the world, organizers said.
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In our global fight for self preservation, we must remember, all the time, that we are all Afghans, we are all Filipinos, we are all Haitians, we are all Iraqis, and more, who struggle against the same forces and share the identical desire for self determination.
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Berlin has suspended the purchase of armed drones on the grounds that it “categorically rejects illegal killings.” This follows a report by Amnesty International that accused Merkel’s government of aiding the US with drone strikes in Pakistan.
A draft agreement between the Social Democrats and the Conservatives obtained by Der Spiegel condemns the use of drones for targeted attacks.
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Thousands rally in Peshawar, amid fears the CIA will aim unmanned anti-Taliban strikes deeper into Pakistani territory
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“We are holding the biggest ever anti-drone protest in Peshawar, where we could decide to block NATO supplies permanently,” Khan, who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), told IPS ahead of massive protests planned by the party for Nov. 23.
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11.24.13
Posted in Action at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) helps unmask misconduct, for which people who hide behind the veil of secrecy are responsible
IN THE FOSS world there is belief in the value of sharing, which generally increases trust through collaboration and peer review. Open Data is said to be the recipe for advantage [1], not disadvantage, and more and more people now use FOIA to impose Open Data principles on their government [2]. The surge of FOIA requests has pushed the FBI into a corner [3,4]. It is struggling to deny or hide wrongdoing.
“The surge of FOIA requests has pushed the FBI into a corner.”A FOIA should be trivial; in fact, it oughtn’t be necessary in the first place. People who say they work in the public’s interest should work publicly and transparently. The CIA, NSA, DHS, FBI etc. give the illusion of transparency and the illusion of compliance with FOIA requests. To them, FOIA is like light to a vampire. When it’s done in larger volumes it becomes somewhat of a DDOS attack which the liars are unable to keep up with (some agency recently said it would take several years merely to prepare, i.e. redact, the document requested by a FOIA request).
Well, very recently, the assassination of John F. Kennedy reached a crucial anniversary and a lot of material got released to the public, not only bringing back memories [5] but also reinforcing people’s opinion that he was assassinated by secret agencies [6-9]. The father of Kennedy’s newphew thought the CIA was involved in this assassination [10] and most US citizens seem to think so too [11]. The secrecy only helps reinforce those opinions; but if the secrecy really does hide confirmatory evidence, then it’s clear that secrecy is the real enemy. Kennedy wanted to crush this secrecy and at one point he said he wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
In the world of software, secrecy seems to be giving us noting but back doors and endless surveillance. Proprietary software (i.e. secret code) needs to become a thing of the past. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Yesterday, the Deputy CTO of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release highlighting the efforts (and success) of the Obama Administration in getting data compiled at public expense into the hands of the private sector for commercial repurposing. The release refers to a McKinsey & Company report that estimates that making such data publicly available “can generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value in seven key domains of the global economy, including education, transportation, and electricity.”
If you are American, the phrase “open data” may not have a familiar ring. If you’ve been following IT policy news in Europe, though, you’ll be aware that for the last year or so the EU in general, and some constituent countries in particular (notably, Great Britain), have been focusing not just on open standards and open source software, but on open data collected at any level of government as well. As in the U.S., such data can cover an almost infinite range of information, from demographics to geospatial to economic to integrations of all of the above – and more. Obviously, such data can have enormous value to the private sector, and especially so if it is made available in a form that can be efficiently utilized by private sector companies.
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Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston’s Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he’s surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a 2006 law targeting activists whose protest actions lead to a “loss of profits” for industry. Shapiro, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed a slideshow of newspaper headlines, posters, and government documents from as far back as the 1800s depicting animal advocates as a threat to national security. Now audience members want to know more about his dissertation and the archives he’s using. But many have a personal request: Would Shapiro help them discover what’s in their FBI files?
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Mother Jones has an interesting profile of Ryan Shapiro, a punk rocker turned animal rights activist turned MIT PhD student, who is officially the “most prolific” filer of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the FBI. At a high point, he was filing an average of two per day. In fact, he filed so many FOIA requests so successfully, that the FBI is now refusing to respond and is giving the courts a secret explanation which they won’t share.
[...]
Later in the article, Shapiro admits that as he got more and more responses, it certainly allowed him to fill in many blanks (and also point him to where to file other requests). This, it seems, is exactly what the FBI fears the most: Shapiro has outsmarted them. While, normally, FOIA responses are done in a manner to limit what information is shared and to never, ever suggest a slightly different query that might be useful, it appears Shapiro has more or less figured out a way around that, in part via bulk requests which lead down other paths of inquiry. No wonder the FBI has stopped responding. Shapiro just plays the game better than they do, and they’re used to a world where the house always wins.
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The CIA has concealed its connections with Lee Harvey Oswald and hence has provoked speculations on the agency’s possible involvement in a conspiracy against President Kennedy, states Anthony Summers, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Irish journalist and writer. In his book “Not In Your Lifetime” Summers reveals the results of his own investigation of the assassination of JFK. The author shared his ideas and conclusions in an exclusive interview with “Voice of Russia”.
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Robert Kennedy Jnr has told ITV News that his father’s first instinct after JFK was shot was to wonder whether the CIA was involved.
Robert Kennedy Snr asked then CIA Director John McCone about it but was reassured that it wasn’t the case.
However Kennedy Snr – JFK’s brother – always felt Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone.
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Posted in Action at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Think about the children”… and “terrorists”… and “terrorist children”…
Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.
Summary: Crushing of non-conformity or a diversity of views (or races) is no longer a cross-border issue but a domestic one
THE Bush and Obama reign symbolises an increase in state-sanctioned torture. People like Dick Cheney played a role in it, but that’s just part of history that’s not too relevant to this article. The matter of fact is, torture is typically outsourced to other countries or islands. It’s a legal loophole. The CIA has some ‘interrogation’/torture sites in Europe [1] (we wrote about this before, and even shared dozen of links about it since last year) and the same facilities and laws are set to become applicable to US citizens also [2,3] (we have shared hundreds of links about it since last year). Putting assassinations by drone aside (it’s a subject for another day), it becomes increasingly clear that the domestic population is increasingly seen as a threat, not a collective to defend. Just see who the NSA is profiling. The same algorithms they ran on the Soviet Union they now apply to US citizens. What seems like racist and aggressive policing [4], abandoning common principles [5], ought to remind us of the possibility of racial profiling used for internment (like Japanese Americans in the 1940s). This is probably scary and it may sound far-fetched, but the legal foundations for it are being put in place. Profiling is not just the business of advertising companies.
Here in the UK, where it is becoming common to crush students [6] because students have the power to engage in activism (they are only starting to become debt-saddled but are not yet profoundly encumbered/imprisoned by debt), we are already learning that secret courts exist because the government is trying to hide torture, which is illegal (so in essence they hide their illegalities/injustices). The torture targets particular races.
Torture has certainly made a comeback here in the Anglo-Saxon territories and in addition to it we have large-scale, wide-ranging assassination strategy, where we simply assume that because it’s done by flying robots in a so-called ‘rogue’ nation, then it’s somehow okay (even if this violates international law). We will deal with the subject next week. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Poland must wrap up a long-running probe into an alleged CIA jail on its territory where suspected Al-Qaeda members were purportedly tortured, and hold those involved accountable, UN monitors said Friday.
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On November 8, senior Democratic Whip Representative James P. McGovern (D-Mass.) sent a letter to leaders of the town of Oxford, Massachusetts, praising them for their passage of a resolution repealing sections of the NDAA that permit the president of the United States to order the indefinite detention of American citizens, denying them their constitutionally protected right of due process.
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The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee submitted on Thursday an already-approved cybersecurity bill to be considered as an amendment to next year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
If the amendment manages to stay intact as Congress prepares to approve the 2014 NDAA, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)’s Cybersecurity Act of 2013 may finally be codified into law.
Rockefeller’s proposal, S.1353, was unanimously approved by the Commerce Committee in July but has stayed relatively dormant ever since. On Thursday he submitted that bill as an amendment to be considered as part of an annual Pentagon spending plan that could fast track his attempts to land his proposal on President Barack Obama’s desk after attempts in Congress to adopt cybersecurity legislation have largely proven to be futile.
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Jennifer Weber can’t read the Gettysburg Address to her students at the University of Kansas without taking a risk.
She chokes up a little, though she’s a Civil War author and historian. “A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” She starts losing it right about there.
“I’m not much of a crying person,” she said.
But whenever she steps inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and starts reading the words of the address carved in stone, the tears well up again.
She doesn’t choke up when she tells the president’s story, though.
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Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other “student-union type stuff”. Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.
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11.18.13
Posted in Action, America, Europe at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from FreeJeremy.net
Summary: Presumption of innocence and fair trials are no longer respected all that much (Hammond judged/punished by the spouse of a Stratfor client)
WHERE minor offences can lead to disproportionately long jail sentences [1] there is a story about Hammond [2], whose case we alluded to the other day. He helped show how surveillance expanded to the private sector (Stratfor) to be used against protests. We should view surveillance as a weapon [3,4] and the ‘trial’ of Hammond as a mockery of the system (connections between the judge and Stratfor [5]). This trial was as unfair as the witchhunt against Aaron Swartz. Punishment against dissent is getting more harsh, potentially requiring no trial for a prison sentence [6,7]. European citizens should be worried about this because this kind of ‘legal’ system is silently entering the EU [8,9], led by the CIA and other aggressors who defend centres of power. Presumption of innocence is becoming a thing to be remembered and noted only in history lessons. Due to ‘national security’ we are told that presumption of innocence is worth abandoning or superseding in some cases. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.
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Jeremy Hammond, a 28-year-old political activist, was sentenced today to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in the Anonymous hack into the computers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). The Ceremonial Courtroom at the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York was filled today with an outpouring of support by journalists, activists and other whistleblowers who see Jeremy Hammond’s actions as a form of civil disobedience, motivated by a desire to protest and expose the secret activities of private intelligence corporations.
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If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgacom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to AT&T. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own.
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Jeremy Hammond’s lawyers plan to file a motion this week for Judge Preska’s recusal. Sparrow Media reported that Preska was made aware of the published connection between her husband and Stratfor and that her husband’s Stratfor-related information was published by Wikileaks, but “Preska indicated that this personal connection to the Hammond case ‘would not effect her ability to be impartial’.” A video from last week’s press conference featuring journalists, attorneys and civil liberties advocates is posted below.
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The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its use of indefinite detention of U.S. citizens has brought liberals and conservatives together across the country. Lane County commissioners Faye Stewart, a conservative, and Pete Sorenson, a progressive, were able to agree on the issue at a recent meeting.
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Ever since President Obama took office in January 2009, and almost immediately promised to close George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he has faced opposition from Congress. Lawmakers only took four months to begin passing legislation designed to tie his hands, and, in recent years, they have imposed restrictions of increasing severity designed to keep Guantánamo open, and to prevent any more prisoners from being released, for reasons that involve either hysteria, cynical fearmongering or bleak games of political football.
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The European Court of Human Rights has rejected a request from the Polish government to exclude the press and public from a hearing next month into whether Poland hosted a secret CIA jail on its soil, the court said on Thursday.
The hearing in Strasbourg, scheduled for December 3, will be the first time an open court has heard the allegations that Warsaw allowed the United States to detain and interrogate al Qaeda suspects in a forest in northern Poland.
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Posted in Action, Microsoft at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of privacy-related news, with special focus on the role played by proprietary software in political espionage
SINCE Microsoft and the NSA are so close and we already know about NSA attempts to put back doors in operating systems, it should not be surprising that Microsoft Windows has a back door (more likely sevral) and Stuxnet was made possible to devise/deploy on Windows. Based on some news from Ars Technica [1], now that a lot of this shocking information is out there, Microsoft is trying to shift away from weak encryption (or breakable encryption), but it’s likely to be too late because Microsoft made such weakness a standard. “Microsoft is retiring two widely used cryptographic technologies that are growing increasingly vulnerable to attacks,” the article says. Further down the article notes: “The state-sponsored Flame malware that targeted Iran pulled off the only known in-the-wild collision attack earlier this decade. Using a never-before seen technique to subvert the MD5 algorithm, Flame-infected computers were able to pose as official servers belonging to Microsoft. By forging Microsoft’s digital signatures, the infected machines were able to trick uninfected computers into installing highly malicious software they otherwise would have refused. Microsoft has since decommissioned MD5 in its update system. Tuesday’s advisory indicates that the company is aiming to learn from that past incident by retiring SHA1 before it falls to the same type of attack.”
But why not assume that this weakness was the result of complicity (with the NSA) rather than an “incident” or some kind of accident? There are other bits of Microsoft software which gleefully invite the NSA in, e.g. Skype (incidentally, the researcher who showed it could be maliciously exploited has just died in an accident [2]).
We need to accept the fact that a lot of software is insecure by design. It’s designed to give power to particular parties, not the users. It’s an important distinction which helps show why proprietary software oughtn’t be trusted.
In other news, the United States’ “Internet Kill Switch” is back in the headlines [3] and countries like Germany are expected to have something to say [4]. Snowden’s E-mail provider is taking privacy up a notch [5] and Snowden’s leaks are said to be having an impact on privacy perceptions [6] because companies like Facebook [7], Google [8], and of course Microsoft do not protect users’ privacy at all. Facebook is notably worse because it helps the government train face recognition classifiers for people whose friends tag them [9]. In case of protests, for example, activists can be identified and named (which helps those who crush protests or intimidate protesters [10]).
There seems to be a shift motivating encryption of the Web [11] and rejection of proprietary software [12] because privacy rights are being misused [13-16], only making privacy advocates stronger and more popular [17]. In the UK, privacy abuses against foreign leaders [18] have been damaging, but not as damaging as the Streisand Effect caused by the attack on the press and on privacy advocates [19]. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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In 2006, while working for the EADS Corporate Research centre, he also put together a paper on how to exploit Skype to act as a botnet.
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In a Freedom of Information Act case brought by EPIC against the Department of Homeland Security, a federal court has ruled that the DHS may not withhold the agency’s plan to deactivate wireless communications networks in a crisis. EPIC had sought “Standard Operating Procedure 303,” also known as the “internet Kill Switch,” to determine whether the agency’s plan could adversely impact free speech or public safety.
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“Ads work the same way and just as with all of the content on Facebook, we show you which of your friends have interacted with something to make it more relevant to you,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan write in a post posted at 12:05PM ET on Friday
While Facebook made a point to clarify the new privacy policy, it’s actually changing very little about it — despite all the backlash the changes caused when they were initially introduced.
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Identifying people from video streams or boatloads of images can be a daunting task for humans and computers.
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On Halloween of this year, EFF and EarthRights International (ERI) filed an appeal in the Second Circuit (PDF) to protect the rights of dozens of environmental activists, journalists, and attorneys from a sweeping subpoena issued by the Chevron Corporation. And just last week, both the Republic of Ecuador (PDF) and a group consisting of Human Rights Watch, Automattic, a pair of anonymous bloggers, and academics Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon (PDF) filed amicus briefs in support of our appeal.
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A vastly larger percentage of the world’s web traffic will be encrypted under a near-final recommendation to revise the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that serves as the foundation for all communications between websites and end users.
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This could spawn migration to GNU/Linux on client and server in governments globally not just a few early adopters like Europe, China, India, Brazil and Russia. By next year there could be dozens of governments making the move. I advised Canada to do that years ago. They might have another idea now that USA is the biggest threat in the world to cybersecurity with documented attacks.
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In criminal cases, defendants have a right to know what evidence the government plans to use against them and how the government gathered that evidence. This basic due process principle is essential: it allows defendants to test in court whether law enforcement officers obtained evidence in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But in a new legal brief, the government has refused to confirm or deny whether it relied on constitutionally questionable mass surveillance programs to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution.
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From Pen America, cosponsored by the ACLU and the Fordham Law School Center on National Security, a talk on surveillance with James Bamford, Ariel Dorfman, Glenn Greenwald, and Bruce Schneier.
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The CIA’s main business is sending operatives abroad to recruit spies and, especially since 9/11, chasing down terrorists for its target-hungry drone pilots. But NR, as it’s known, is the agency’s stay-at-home division. It’s nothing like Homeland, however, with operatives running about with guns in the D.C. suburbs (though its 1960s-era predecessors once spied on antiwar and civil rights activists and recruited Cuban exiles to harass Fidel Castro). It also works with the FBI and NSA in bugging foreign diplomatic missions there.
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For me, this has been a perfect illustration of the positive aspects of the web. With the rampart commercialization of the Internet and issues such as advertisers tracking users surfing habits, the NSA’s gathering data on nearly everything that happens online and crackers trying to break into computers at every turn, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the public network is nothing but a virtual space fraught with danger. But it’s also a place of great promise, as Charlie’s story so aptly demonstrates.
Twenty years ago, my roommate and her family would not be able to follow the progress being made by Charlie nearly so closely. They would’ve had to rely on bits and pieces of often unreliable, certainly incomplete, information picked up by word of mouth through phone calls. They would not have felt as involved with the situation as they now do either, which is also important.
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Dark Mail alliance is the non-profit group formed by the leaders of Silent Circle and Lavabit.
Silent Circle offers a suite of secure, communication services, while Lavabit is the secure email provider used by Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA contractor now living in Russia.
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Britain’s GCHQ intelligence service monitors diplomats’ travels using a sophisticated automated system that tracks hotel bookings. Once a room has been identified, it opens the door to a variety of spying options.
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11.17.13
Posted in Action at 11:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The large and multinational corporations are getting their way
Photo by Guillaume Paumier
Summary: The cause of net neutrality, which basically bans censorship based on medium or requester, is becoming a lost cause because politicians and bureaucrats stop fighting for it
TALKS about net neutrality in Europe are getting rather pathetic [1]. It sure seems like net neutrality is at the point of no return and not enough citizens do something about it, let alone get upset. Over in the US, where the FCC has just put a sort of mole in charge, there is pretense of support for unlocking [2] and something to do with connection speed [3], not net neutrality. It is almost as though the FCC has officially given up on net neutrality. We need to return the subject of net neutrality to the agenda, or else we’ll lose net neutrality for good. Don’t rely on corporations because even the Internet giant Google shifted from supporting net neutrality to opposing it (or supporting its annulment in a way that works well for Google). This is related but still separate from the subject of privacy/surveillance on the Internet (more on that tomorrow). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The proposal from the European Commission in September leaves the door open for certain types of Internet traffic management to scan and discriminate between various types of content, Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor (EDPS), said in a published opinion.
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On January 26th of 2013 cellphone locking in the United States effectively became illegal, at least without permission from your existing carrier. Although most carriers will unlock your device for a fee, there’s still a lot of confusion on the matter.
Since January, we’ve seen petitions calling for the ability to freely unlock mobile devices in the United States, and there has even been proposed legislation targeting the issue.
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The Federal Communications Commission has released a mobile speed test app for Android to help the agency crowdsource data about wireless performance across the country. The app, simply named the FCC Speed Test, doesn’t have the best looking design out there, but it doesn’t necessarily need to: once installed, it’ll automatically check a phone’s connection speed in the background when the device is not in use. While that’ll allow individual users to clearly see how well their own data provider is performing, it’ll more importantly allow the FCC to gather a wide amount of data on cellular carriers nationwide — that is, if its app gets enough users.
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