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John Lemke

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 0 views

  • “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
  • Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 
  • Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
    • John Lemke
       
      Wow, how is not changing pictures and creating false victims not identity theft and conspiracy?  
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  • it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption.
    • John Lemke
       
      Not only are you now guilty until proven innocent but, if you are guilty enough, we shall create a situation so that you are.
  • Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups. Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
    • John Lemke
       
      So one of the guys who advocates this and approves of it, gets to be on the NSA review committee?  Isn't that like Ted Kennedy on the Ethics Review Committee or the Warren Commission?
  • Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.
John Lemke

Recording Industry Rep Suggests Parents Should Slap Their Children To Stop Piracy | Tec... - 0 views

  • A ruling handed down yesterday by Germany's highest court represents a blow to rightsholders in their quest to clamp down on illicit file-sharing. The court ruled that the parents of a teenager who had made available more than 1,100 songs on file-sharing networks can not be held responsible for their son's infringements, nor be required to monitor or hinder his online activities.
  • The Court ruled that the parents had met their parental obligations when they informed their child of "basic do's and don'ts" including that file-sharing copyrighted content online is illegal. Furthermore, the Court ruled that the parents were not required to monitor their child's online activities nor install special software to restrict his online behavior. This would only be required should the parents have "reasonable grounds" to presume that their child would engage in infringing activities online.
John Lemke

Online Community Building and the Secret Sauce | Spin Sucks - 0 views

  • the real juice is in the content.
  • I read a blog post he wrote about community. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that you don’t have a community until people begin talking to one another without your participation. Until then, it’s just comments. And he’s right. You know you’ve hit community mecca when people come to your site to talk to one another, with your content as the conversation starter.
John Lemke

White House releases trusted Internet ID plan - security, government, Google, Gary Lock... - 0 views

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    The U.S. government will coordinate private-sector efforts to create trusted identification systems for the Internet, with the goal of giving consumers and businesses multiple options for authenticating identity online, according to a plan released by President Barack Obama's administration. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with private companies to drive development and adoption of trusted ID technologies, White House officials said. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), released by the Department of Commerce on Friday, aims to protect the privacy and security of Internet users by encouraging a broad online authentication market in the U.S. "The fact is that the old password and username combination we often use to verify people is no longer good enough," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said at an NSTIC release event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It leaves too many consumers, government agencies and businesses vulnerable to ID and data theft."
John Lemke

Introducing DNSCrypt (Preview Release) - 0 views

  • DNSCrypt has the potential to be the most impactful advancement in Internet security since SSL, significantly improving every single Internet user's online security and privacy.
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    DNSCrypt has the potential to be the most impactful advancement in Internet security since SSL, significantly improving every single Internet user's online security and privacy.
John Lemke

Commander Hadfield's Amazing Cover Of David Bowie's Space Oddity Disappears Today, Than... - 0 views

  • Commander Hadfield posted on Twitter this morning that today is the last day for the video online, because they only had a license to use it for one year.
  • It's got over 22 million views, and it's about to go away... because of copyright and the idea that everything needs to be licensed.
  • One would hope that David Bowie (and/or whoever else holds the copyrights in question) would recognize just how insanely bad this looks and would "grant" a perpetual free license to keep this video online. Bowie, himself, has had a rather progressive view of copyright for many years. Back in 2002, for example, Bowie declared that "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing," and further noting that this is "terribly exciting."
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    What a shame. Especially since he did a great job with the cover.
John Lemke

Kurt Eichenwald Claims Snowden Is A Chinese Spy And Leaks Are Just To Protect Their Cyb... - 0 views

  • And the attempts to tar and feather Ed Snowden continue. The latest is that famed reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who started attacking Ed Snowden months ago, has written up a long speculative article for Newsweek arguing that Ed Snowden has "escalated the cyber war" by giving China the necessary cover it needs to avoid reining in its own cyber attacks
  • That is, if you follow the bizarre logic here, without Snowden, Eichenwald believes that the US would have somehow convinced the Chinese to stop their cyber attack program. And, now because of Snowden, the Chinese can ignore that effort, by pointing out that the US is doing a ton of online hacking too.
  • Again, nearly everything about that statement is ridiculous. He didn't "leave all of the documents in Hong Kong." He provided heavily encrypted versions to a very small number of journalists, and then got rid of the files himself. Eichenwald takes that to mean he "left" them in Hong Kong, based on nothing, and all of this apparently means that Snowden is working for the Chinese (even though he left China pretty quickly).
John Lemke

Air Force Wants Hundreds of Fake Online Identities - Slashdot - 0 views

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    security privacy etc.
John Lemke

FBI pushes for surveillance backdoors in Web 2.0 tools - 0 views

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    The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps. LUMPY HAS NOTES BELOW ties in with securirty and cyber attack.. use it as excuse
John Lemke

The Internet Isn't Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To 'Fix' It? | Techdirt - 0 views

  • Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any "help" from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn't been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.
  • And that's the thing. The internet works just fine. The only reason to "fix" it, is to "break" it in exactly the way the ITU wants, which is to favor a few players who have done nothing innovative to actually deserve it.
John Lemke

US banks hit by more than a week of cyberattacks (Update) - 0 views

    • John Lemke
       
      They believe it was not a hacktivist attack because they are usually also associated with a rise in IRC and social network activity, those who would be joining the hacktivist event, and this even had no such spike.
  • Could a state actor be at play? U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, without offering any proof, said he believed the assaults were carried out by Iran in retaliation for tightened economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.
  • only a handful of groups out there that have the technical ability or incentive
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  • at least half a dozen banks—including the Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup—have witnessed traffic surges and disruptions. Not all have confirmed they were the victims of an online onslaught, but such surges are a hallmark of denial-of-service attacks, which work by drowning target websites with streams of junk data.
  • Such attacks are fairly common and generally don't compromise sensitive data or do any lasting damage. Still, they can be a huge headache for companies that rely on their websites to interact with customers.
  • Most say the recent spate of attacks has been unusually powerful. PNC bank, which was hit on Thursday, has never seen such a strong surge in traffic, spokesman Fred Solomon said in a telephone interview. Smith said he estimated the flow of data at 60 to 65 gigabits per second.
John Lemke

Little red lawsuit: Prince sues 22 people for pirating his songs | The Verge - 0 views

  • The case, filed as Prince v. Chodera in the Northern District of California, reads, "The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince's material." Only two defendants are named in the suit, however — the rest are listed as John Does, though eight do have the distinction of being regarded by their online handles. Nevertheless, Prince, based on "information and belief," alleges that each of the individuals worked together on Facebook and Blogger to conduct infringing activity, and lists extensively the mirror sites and blogs each used to distribute copies of his work. He has thus demanded $1 million with interest in damages from each of the defendants, along with a permanent injunction to prevent all of them from doing further harm.
John Lemke

The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

  • According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks. The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has "access to our very hardest targets."
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    Page One of a good three page read on just how extensive the government's illegal spying operations actually are... the worst part is it is just how extensive the portions of it we know about are!
John Lemke

NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware | The Verge - 0 views

  • According to a new report from Der Spiegel based on internal NSA documents, the signals intelligence agency's elite hacking unit (TAO) is able to conduct sophisticated wiretaps in ways that make Hollywood fantasy look more like reality. The report indicates that the NSA, in collaboration with the CIA and FBI, routinely and secretly intercepts shipping deliveries for laptops or other computer accessories in order to implant bugs before they reach their destinations. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA's TAO group is able to divert shipping deliveries to its own "secret workshops" in a method called interdiction, where agents load malware onto the electronics or install malicious hardware that can give US intelligence agencies remote access. While the report does not indicate the scope of the program, or who the NSA is targeting with such wiretaps, it's a unique look at the agency's collaborative efforts with the broader intelligence community to gain hard access to communications equipment. One of the products the NSA appears to use to compromise target electronics is codenamed COTTONMOUTH, and has been available since 2009; it's a USB "hardware implant" that secretly provides the NSA with remote access to the compromised machine.
  • The Der Spiegel report, which gives a broad look at TAO operations, also highlights the NSA's cooperation with other intelligence agencies to conduct Hollywood-style raids. Unlike most of the NSA's operations which allow for remote access to targets, Der Spiegel notes that the TAO's programs often require physical access to targets. To gain physical access, the NSA reportedly works with the CIA and FBI on sensitive missions that sometimes include flying NSA agents on FBI jets to plant wiretaps. "This gets them to their destination at the right time and can help them to disappear again undetected after even as little as a half hour's work," the report notes.
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    While the scope or the targets are reportedly not known, the article also does not mention anything about a search warrant. This is what happens when the government feels they are above the law.
John Lemke

FBI surveillance malware in bomb threat case tests constitutional limits | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The FBI has an elite hacker team that creates customized malware to identify or monitor high-value suspects who are adept at covering their tracks online, according to a published report.
  • as the capability to remotely activate video cameras and report users' geographic locations—is pushing the boundaries of constitutional limits on searches and seizures
  • Critics compare it to a physical search that indiscriminately seizes the entire contents of a home, rather than just those items linked to a suspected crime. Former US officials said the FBI uses the technique sparingly, in part to prevent it from being widely known.
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  • "We have transitioned into a world where law enforcement is hacking into people’s computers, and we have never had public debate,” Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post, speaking of the case against Mo. "Judges are having to make up these powers as they go along."
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