In recent weeks the governments of Britain, Israel, the US, Japan, India and China have reported alleged cyber attacks by foreign militaries, hackers, and malicious software like Duqu, a virus similar to the Stuxnet cyber weapon constructed by Israel and the US for use against Iran’s nuclear program. Although the nature and origin of the attacks or even whether they took place at all cannot be independently confirmed, the supposed threats are being used to propose punishing new legislation aimed at stifling internet freedoms and are igniting new rivalries in what many see as the battlefield of the 21st century: cyberspace.
?Facebook was recently invaded by a robot army created by four researchers to demonstrate the ease at which online social networks can be maliciously exploited by the unscrupulous.
With a horde of 102 bogus Facebook friends, the University of British Columbia researchers showed that they could harvest personal information on members not publically available on the social network and that its defenses were inadequate to cope with a large scale infiltration.
During the course of an eight week campaign on Facebook, the researchers gathered 250GB of information from thousands of the social network’s members. Their “sockpuppet” bots were “friended” by more than 3000 members and the network reached more than a million profiles.
To launch their mischief on Facebook, the quartet—Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu—used a new breed of botnet called a socialbot. What distinguishes a socialbot from other kinds of bots is that it’s designed to pass itself off as a human being. That allows it to obtain a privileged position in an online social network (OSN). In the case of Facebook, that position would be “friend.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.
In responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the department is withholding two legal analyses by then-government lawyer John Yoo, and is revealing just eight sentences from a third Yoo memo dated Nov. 2, 2001. That memo is at least 21 pages long.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what’s going on.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
The interrogation of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar followed a pattern.
First, Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses beat the 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist in a windowless room two stories below ground in the Persian Gulf kingdom’s National Security Apparatus building. Then, they dragged him upstairs for questioning by a uniformed officer armed with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations, he says.
If he refused to sufficiently explain his communications, he was sent back for more beatings, says Al Khanjar, who was detained from August 2010 to February.
“It was amazing,” he says of the messages they obtained. “How did they know about these?”
The answer: Computers loaded with Western-made surveillance software generated the transcripts wielded in the interrogations described by Al Khanjar and scores of other detainees whose similar treatment was tracked by rights activists, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October issue.
The spy gear in Bahrain was sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations. Both requested anonymity because they have signed nondisclosure agreements. The sale and maintenance contracts were also confirmed by Ben Roome, a Nokia Siemens spokesman based in Farnborough, England.
Apparently public information can be redacted into an unaccountable oblivion, and the only boundary to black-marks are your private parts where they end for the sake of voyeurism. EPIC’s Freedom of Information Act requestwas answered with what looks more like a Hubble malfunction than a document regarding body-scanners andmobile X-ray(Backscatter) vans.See PDF.
The implication of such things are many, and it is not surprising that the very agency vigilantly attempting to criminalize normal civilians would want to keep these technologies as private as possible while applying them on the public. The good news – however hopeless – is that EPIC has filed suit to force disclosure of these documents. If it is the public who are to be the subjects of this technology, then it is the public who should be thoroughly informed of it. The DHS clearly opposes this, and seeks to covertly employ their spyware wherever they can. We really must ask where this will stop if left unchecked. The likeliest answer is that it will not.
Last Friday, the federal government’s new anti-terror database, the Terror Screening Watchlist Service, went live. The database is loaded with an unknown amount of personal information, including names, photographs and biometric data. In a new turn that has civil liberties advocates crying foul, the Department of Homeland Security is claiming all information contained in the watchlist is confidential.
Earlier today, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several other groups filed a formal complaint with DHS about the blanket exemptions to the Privacy Act.
Under DHS’ rules guidelines for the Terror Watch Lists, individuals “do not have an opportunity to decline to provide information” for the database, and cannot obtain the relevant information through the Federal Privacy Act. The Privacy Act is one of the milestone reforms passed in the wake of the Watergate spying scandal. It permits individuals to obtain law enforcement files about them by the government, with the intent of correcting incorrect information.
Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.
The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.
A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.
It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.
Demonstrates the use of MORIS – the first of its kind mobile multi-modal biometric recognition device based on the iPhone. It is utilizing iris recognition in addition to face and fingerprint. For more information, please visit: http://www.bi2technologies.com/MORIS
A controversial piece of facial recognition technology (and a PopSci “Best of What’s New 2010” alum) is rolling out in police stations across the country this fall, and naturally not everyone is happy about it. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System (MORIS) uses an augmented iPhone to snap pictures of faces, scan fingerprints, and even to image irises, and then combs through police databases looking for matching identities. This, understandably, has privacy and civil liberties advocates crying foul.
The MORIS device attaches to the back of an iPhone, adding roughly 1.75 inches to the thickness of the smartphone. Police officers armed with the tool can take a photo of a person’s face from about five feet away, or scan his or her iris from about six inches, and wirelessly beam that data to law enforcement databases elsewhere to look for a match. It can also perform remote fingerprint matching.
Similar biometric technology has been deployed by the U.S. military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to confirm the identities of civilians entering military safe zones and to search for known insurgents at checkpoints. But rolling it out in the streets of the U.S. has plenty of people concerned with privacy and Constitutional issues.
LONDON — At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.
MEPs led the campaign to stop the use of the scanners in the Parliament yet they are in use in 70 airports across Europe, including London Heathrow Photo: PA
The body scanners, bought in 2005 at a cost of £100,000 each, are “rotting” in the basement of the building in Brussels and have never been used.
When the scanners, which create an image of a person’s nude body, were eventually delivered to the Parliament in the autumn of 2005 MEPs objected to them being used in the building on privacy grounds.
Nikki Sinclair, a British independent MEP, said the Parliament tried to sell the machines but failed to do so.
(NaturalNews) As if it’s not enough for the TSA to feel you up at the airport, now they’re experimenting with rapid results DNA scanners that can scan and analyze your DNA using just a drop of saliva. Spit at the TSA agent who is molesting you, in other words, and they can use that saliva to scan your DNA and then store it in a government database.
Why would they want to do that? We can only imagine. Remember, it was Alex Jones who broke the story about hospitals secretly taking blood samples of babies and handing them over to the federal government for use in a national genetic database (http://www.prisonplanet.com/newborn…).
The government routinely steals genetic material from people for its own nefarious purposes, as does the pharmaceutical industry. For example, the medical industry’s so-called “Hela cells” which have been exploited for decades by vaccine and drug companies, were harvested and stolen decades ago from Henrietta Lacks without her permission or consent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa). Hela cells are the foundation of hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for Big Pharma, and they are all based on DNA theft perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry.
Harvesting your DNA at the airport
Now that the TSA is experimenting with portable DNA scanners, their real agenda becomes apparent: They will use airport security checkpoints to harvest DNA from the public in order to build up their government “bio bank” database of stolen DNA.
For all those conspiracy theorists out there, 2012 just got a little more ominous. As required by legislation passed this last summer, Russia will adopt a universal ID card starting next year. The Universal Electronic Card (UEC) is intended to eventually replace all local, regional, and national forms of ID, providing a central database through which Russians can access everything from medical insurance to ATMs. According to the official website, the UEC will be adopted by around 1000 national and regional services along with about 10,000 commercial enterprises. The mayor of Moscow has already declared it will be able to handle public transportation there, and we can expect similar adoptions throughout the nation. Will all Russians be carrying a single form of ID that is their only passport to all public and private services? Looks like it. A similar project has started in India, and there are experiments for related concepts in Mexico. Universal ID is starting to catch on around the globe. Where will it spread to next?
Ostensibly, the UEC is designed to push the Russian ID system into the 21st century. Not only is the card to provide a way for citizens to easily make electronic purchases (in person and online) it is supposed to cut down on fraud. While it doesn’t seem to include any biometrics, the card has other security measures. All information (whether for public or commercial use) will be stored in a database, not on the card. The UEC will have a number, a ‘passcode’, that points the user to the appropriate record in the database. It’s unclear what kind of readers (RF, magnetic strip, etc) will be able to access the UEC, but the site says that at least one (perhaps the only one ) will be contactless. For financial transactions users will be able to set predefined limits so that the card can only withdraw a restricted amount of funds over a period of time. Each use of the UEC will require the entry of a personal identification number, and get this, everyone will be granted a fake PIN as well! If someone is coercing you into using your UEC, then enter the fake PIN. Authorities will be notified surreptitiously while the transaction appears to be continuing regularly. I’m sure we can think of a dozen ways to get around that, but still, pretty cloak and dagger there, Russia.
Examples of how the UEC will work. Translations welcome.
Starting in 2012, Russians will be able to carry the UEC and start connecting it to their bank accounts, credit cards, bus passes, etc. Due to the legal mandate most of the businesses and all of the local/regional/national services will be required to accept it. Convenient, yes. Potentially disastrous? Maybe so, but Russia’s not going to be alone in this. India is adopting a universal ID for national identity, and is going to encourage public institutions and commercial enterprises to accept it. That UID, however, will contain some pretty thorough biometrics. Programs in Mexico (powered by a company in the US) will experiment with iris-based identification for public and commercial purposes, albeit on a smaller scale. Universal ID, especially those with advanced security features, seem to be a rising trend on the global stage.
In a complaint filed Monday morning in the U.S. District Court for Minnesota, Ventura is suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its secretary, Janet Napolitano, as well as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and its administrator, John Pistole.
Ventura accuses the agencies of violating his “basic rights to privacy and dignity, and his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures,” after he received a pat-down by a TSA agent at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in November 2010.
Ventura, who said he has a titanium implant after hip replacement surgery in 2008, alleges the pat-down included “warrantless, non-suspicion-based offensive touching, gripping and rubbing of the genital and other sensitive areas of his body,” which, the lawsuit contends, met “the definition for an unlawful sexual assault.”
Ventura’s Minneapolis-based attorney, David Olsen, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this afternoon, “The security procedures are going too far. There’s a line somewhere and he believes that line has been crossed.”
Olsen said Ventura no longer flies on commercial aviation because he is unwilling to submit to either a pat-down or a full-body scan, putting his job as host of cable television’s Conspiracy Theory show, in jeopardy.
“He’s made a decision that someone needs to make a stand and he’s not one to back down from a fight,” said Olsen. “He sees the erosion of civil liberties here and he’s willing to stand up not only for himself, but for others.”
MINNEAPOLIS – Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Ventura is asking a federal judge in Minnesota to issue an injunction ordering officials to stop subjecting him to “warrantless and suspicionless” scans and body searches.
The lawsuit, which also names Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole as defendants, argues the searches are “unwarranted and unreasonable intrusions on Governor Ventura’s personal privacy and dignity . and are a justifiable cause for him to be concerned for his personal health and well-being.”
According to the lawsuit, Ventura received a hip replacement in 2008, and since then, his titanium implant has set off metal detectors at airport security checkpoints. The lawsuit said that prior to last November officials had used a non-invasive hand-held wand to scan his body as a secondary security measure.
But when Ventura set off the metal detector in November, he was instead subjected to a body pat-down and was not given the option of a scan with a hand-held wand or an exemption for being a frequent traveler, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said the pat-down “exposed him to humiliation and degradation through unwanted touching, gripping and rubbing of the intimate areas of his body.”
It claims that under TSA’s policy, Ventura will be required to either go through a full-body scanner or submit to a pat-down every time he travels because he will always set off the metal detector.
Ventura, who was Minnesota governor from 1999 through 2002 and is now the host of the television program “Conspiracy Theory,” did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.
“This entire scheme rests on the ability to link Internet presence/roles with real-world identities. So even if no physical card ever exists, the system as currently understood would very much equate to a national ID card for accessing the Internet.”
It’s been called the “Trusted Internet ID” scheme by some observers. It won’t matter what we choose to call the government’s proposed Internet licensing system because in the end we probably won’t have a say in it.
Earlier in the week we reported that the US Department of Commerce was preparing to create an Internet ID for all Americans. White House Cyber security Coordinator Howard Schmidt said that the Department of Commerce is “the absolute perfect spot in the US government” to build an online “identity ecosystem.”
Right off the bat I can tell you that attempting to force people to identify themselves on a national level doesn’t have much to do with the Department of Commerce’s official mission. We should all be feeling skeptical about this ID scheme.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the “USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?”
She said she was starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages, after being told by Twitter that a subpoena had been issued. She wrote: “department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info – I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over.”
One of the worst things that is bound to happen in the next few years is the inevitable Big Government clampdown on the world’s last stronghold of free speech: the internet.
Reykjavik calls for explanation of Justice Department’s move to access account of politician caught up in WikiLeaks inquiry
Birgitta Jonsdottir – Iceland MP and former WikiLeaks collaborator. The US Justice Department is seeking access to her Twitter account as it tries to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images
The American ambassador to Iceland has been summoned to explain why US officials are trying to access the Twitter account of an Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks collaborator.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, revealed last week that the US justice department had asked Twitter to hand over her information. The US authorities are trying to build a criminal case against the website after its huge leaks of classified US information.
“[It is] very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official,” the interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, told Icelandic broadcaster RUV. “This is even more serious when put [in] perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people’s freedom in general,” he added.
Iceland’s foreign ministry has demanded a meeting with Luis Arreaga, the US ambassador to Reykjavík. No one at the US embassy in Reykjavík was available for comment.
The goal is to enhance online security and privacy through “trusted digital identities.”
The Obama Administration announced plans to develop an internet identity ecosystem that officials claim will reduce fraud and identity theft while streamlining online transactions.
The Obama Administration is committed to reducing Internet fraud by developing a comprehensive, national online identity strategy, United State Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said on Jan. 7. Cyber-security” and digital identity was a “national top priority” issue, said Locke.
Locke was joined by Howard Schmidt, the White House Cybersecurity coordinator, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University, where they outlined the framework for an “identity ecosystem” which will allow people to complete online transactions with confidence that their personal information was safe
RALEIGH — Next month, 13 law enforcement agencies in the region will begin using a new handheld device that lets an officer scan a person’s fingerprints and seek a match in an electronic database – all without going anywhere.
Police say taking fingerprints in the field will allow them to work more efficiently and safely. But the ACLU North Carolina in Raleigh worries that the device may allow officers to violate privacy rights.
The ACLU is concerned about what will become of fingerprint scans that are sent to other databases, such as the National Crime Information Center.
Carolina Hurricanes vs Washington Capitals 12/26
“Part of the danger is the idea of the government creating a database on its citizens,” said Sarah Preston, policy director for ACLU North Carolina. “Citizens should be allowed some degree of privacy.”
But those concerns are unwarranted, said Sam Pennica, director of the City-County Bureau of Identification, the agency that processes fingerprints in Wake County and is providing the devices to local agencies. The software for the device, known as Rapid Identification COPS Technology, would not store fingerprints of any individuals, even those charged with a crime, Pennica said.
“It will not retain the fingerprints of any individuals under any circumstances,” he said, adding that fingerprints would only be compared to those in the Wake County database. “They will not be submitted to any state or federal agency.” (Sure! Watch former Governor Jesse Ventura and let’s see if you still believe this.)
California is giving the green light to allowing video cameras to be mounted onto vehicle windshields in an attempt to improve road safety.
WASHINGTON – Rearview cameras could become more common in future cars and trucks under rules proposed by the government Friday to address concerns about drivers unintentionally backing over children.
The new requirements from the Transportation Department are intended to improve rear visibility in cars by the 2014 model year. Most carmakers would comply by installing rear-mounted video cameras and in-vehicle displays. The government estimated that video systems would add about $200 to the cost of each new vehicle.
Congress in 2008 set in motion the safety upgrades in response to dozens of accidents in which children were backed over. At issue in particular were blind zones in large sport utility vehicles and pickups.
“There is no more tragic accident than for a parent or caregiver to back out of a garage or driveway and kill or injure an undetected child playing behind the vehicle,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. He said the changes would “help drivers see into those blind zones directly behind vehicles to make sure it is safe to back up.”
Nearly 300 people are killed and 18,000 injured each year because of backovers, according to data kept by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Many happen in driveways and parking lots. Nearly half the deaths involve children under age 5, and the crashes also affect the elderly.
The agency estimated that the requirements annually could save 95 to 112 lives and prevent more than 7,000 injuries. (Sure!)
US airport security is facing growing anger from the public at new anti-terrorism screening procedures considered invasive and harmful.
A software engineer has gained national notoriety after posting an internet blog item saying he had been ejected and threatened with a fine for refusing a groin check after turning down a full-body scan at San Diego airport.
The passenger, John Tyner, said he told a Transportation Security Administration agent: “If you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested.”
Tyner’s individual protest quickly became an internet sensation, but questions also came from travel business groups, civil liberties activists and pilots, raising concerns both about the procedures themselves and about the possibility of delays caused by passengers reluctant to accept the new procedures.
Thanksgiving Day, a harvest festival, is the fourth Thursday in November in the United States, and marks one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.
Across the country passengers are simmering over being forced to choose scans by full-body image detectors or probing pat-downs. Top federal security officials said that the procedures were safe and necessary sacrifices to ward off terror attacks.
“It’s all about security,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. “It’s all about everybody recognising their role.”
Law enforcement agencies are digging deep into the social media accounts of applicants, requesting that candidates sign waivers allowing investigators access to their Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other personal spaces.
Some agencies are demanding that applicants provide private passwords, Internet pseudonyms, text messages and e-mail logs as part of an expanding vetting process for public safety jobs.
More than a third of police agencies review applicants’ social media activity during background checks, according to the first report on agencies’ social media use by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the largest group of police executives. The report out last month surveyed 728 agencies.
“As more and more people join these networks, their activities on these sites become an intrinsic part of any background check we do,” said Laurel, Md., Police Chief David Crawford.
Privacy advocates say some background investigations, including requests for text message and e-mail logs, may go too far.
“I’m very uneasy about this,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Where does it all stop?”
Emails and mobile phone text messages would be stored for six months by internet service providers (ISPs), according to a bill presented by the Swedish government on Thursday to bring the country in line with EU dataretention rules.
Critics have come down hard on the proposal, which would compel telephone and broadband providers to retain electronic data for six months, the shortest possible time in accordance with EU directives.
Justice Minister Beatrice Ask explained that the bill is concerned about privacy when she presented the legislative proposal on Thursday.
“The proposal means that the information can only be disclosed for crime-fighting purposes,” Ask said a news conference.
The government has proposed that the law come into force on July 1st, 2011. It is part of the introduction of the disputed EU Data Retention Directive.
The directive would force member states to legislate the storage of telephone calls, text messages, email and other internet traffic. The aim is to prevent and solve crimes.
The Data Retention Directive has been severely criticised by those who believe that such rules restrict privacy protection and create a surveillance society.
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