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Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks Reveals The "Snowden Stopper": CIA Tool To Track Whistleblowers - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...227305

surveillance state CIA Scribbles whistle-blowers MS-Office

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • As the latest installment of it’s ‘Vault 7’ series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as ‘Scribbles’ (a.k.a. the “Snowden Stopper”), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of ‘web beacon’ tags into documents “likely to be stolen.” The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon’s creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks’ press release:
  • Today, April 28th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the documentation and source code for CIA’s “Scribbles” project, a document-watermarking preprocessing system to embed “Web beacon”-style tags into documents that are likely to be copied by Insiders, Whistleblowers, Journalists or others. The released version (v1.0 RC1) is dated March, 1st 2016 and classified SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN until 2066. Scribbles is intended for off-line preprocessing of Microsoft Office documents. For reasons of operational security the user guide demands that “[t]he Scribbles executable, parameter files, receipts and log files should not be installed on a target machine, nor left in a location where it might be collected by an adversary.”
  • The ‘Scribbles’ User Guide explains how the tool generates a random watermark for each document, inserts that watermark into the document, saves all such processed documents in an output directory, and creates a log file which identifies the watermarks inserted into each document. Scribbles can watermark multiple documents in one batch and is designed to watermark several groups of documents.
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  • Dr. Martin McHugh, Information Technology Programme chair at Dublin Institute of Technology, gave the RT more details on how the “Scribbles” tool can be used for “bad as well as good.” “Methods of tracking have historically been developed for our protection but have evolved to become used to track us without our knowledge.” “Web beacons typically go unnoticed. A tiny file is loaded as part of a webpage. Once this file is accessed, it records unique information about you, such as your IP address and sends this back to the creator of the beacon.” But, the “Scribbles” user guide notes there is just one small problem with the program…it only works with Microsoft Office products.  So, if end users use other programs such as OpenOffice of LibreOffice then the CIA’s watermarks become visible to the end user and their cover is blown.
Paul Merrell

Turkish Police and Protesters Clash in Istanbul's Taksim Square - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-protests-istanbul-turkey.html

war & peace Turkey Arab Spring

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • ISTANBUL — Taksim Square was engulfed in chaos on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning as riot police using tear gas and water cannons forced thousands of protesters from the square, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey struggled to contain a political crisis that has threatened the nation’s economy and paralyzed the government.
  • For nearly two weeks, the prime minister has remained largely defiant, demanding that protesters leave the square, placing armed police officers on standby to sweep the area and insisting that the demonstrations were nothing like the Arab Spring protests that ousted entrenched leaders. But as homemade firebombs and tear gas wafted in the city center it seemed that Mr. Erdogan and his supporters had miscalculated the opposition’s tenacity and conviction.
  • On Monday, he offered to talk on Wednesday — but then sent the police back to clear out the protesters. By Wednesday morning, the operation had succeeded, but anger over Mr. Erdogan’s handling of the protests had not abated. The Associated Press reported from Ankara that thousands of black-robed lawyers left courthouses around the country on Wednesday to protest the behavior of the police. And a group of protesters that had been invited to meet with Mr. Erdogan did not include representatives of Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella organization, which said in a statement reported by the Zaman newspaper that while “police violence” continued around Gezi Park, such meetings would produce nothing. The outcome of that meeting, which began late in the afternoon, was not immediately clear.
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  • Three people have been killed and at least 4,947 injured in the violence.
  • When the day began it appeared that the government had a cautious strategy aimed at reining in the protests by clearing the square, but leaving the demonstrators in the park. A Twitter message from the provincial governor, Huseyin Avni Mutlu, said, “This morning you are in the safe hands of your police brothers.” But there was so much distrust in the park that demonstrators began girding for an attack. Some scribbled their blood types on their arms in ink, in case they needed emergency care. Doctors in a makeshift medical tent were ready to tend to those suffering the effects of tear gas.
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