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link By Malia Zimmerman Published May 16, 2017 Fox News Facebook Twitter Comments Email Print Now Playing Rod Wheeler on his investigation into DNC staffer's murder The family of the Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., blasted reports that he was a source of emails leaked to WikiLeaks. Rod Wheeler, a retired Washington homicide detective and Fox News contributor investigating the case on behalf of the Rich family, made the WikiLeaks claim, which was corroborated by a federal investigator who spoke to Fox News.

Wheeler made his comments on the possible Rich-Wikileaks connection in a story first reported Monday night by Fox 5 DC.  In an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity" Tuesday night, Wheeler said a "federal investigator that was involved on the inside of the case" saw Rich's computer and the case file. Wheeler told host Sean Hannity the investigator "came across [as] very credible. When you look at that, with the totality of everything else that I found in this case, it’s very consistent for a person with my experience to begin to think, 'Well, perhaps there were some email communication between Seth and Wikileaks.'"

But a spokesman for Rich's family on Tuesday said Wheeler was not authorized to speak for the family and called assertions Seth Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks "unsubstantiated." Brad Bauman said even if purported emails were to surface, it would not necessarily mean Rich had helped WikiLeaks.

Customers of Silent Circle’s encrypted mail service got an unfortunate surprise on Friday: all their messages had been deleted. The management  of Silent Circle, an encryption firm that specializes in smartphone communication, abruptly shut down their e-mail service yesterday, saying they were pre-empting the U.S. government from forcing them to hand over customer data. While they were confident they could protect text messages, voice calls and video calls, e-mail had always been less secure because it relied on standard Internet protocols. Yesterday’s catalyst was a competitor, Lavabit, whose founder announced he was shutting his email-hosting company down due to an apparent government investigation, and told Forbes on Friday: “If you knew what I knew about e-mail, you might not use it.” Edward Snowden had been a Lavabit user.

Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration’s surveillance practices. She also ordered the government to cease enforcing the gag provision in any other cases. However, she stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We are very pleased that the Court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute,” said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a challenge to NSLs on behalf of an unknown telecom that received an NSL in 2011. “The government’s gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience.” The telecommunications company received the ultra-secret demand letter in 2011 from the FBI seeking information about a customer or customers. The company took the extraordinary and rare step of challenging the underlying authority of the National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it.

Both challenges are allowed under a federal law that governs NSLs, a power greatly expanded under the Patriot Act that allows the government to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs over the years and has been reprimanded for abusing them — though almost none of the requests have been challenged by the recipients. After the telecom challenged the NSL, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure and sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority. The move stunned EFF at the time.

The US-based Black Lives Matter movement has called Israel an "apartheid state" and said it is joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign over acts of "genocide against the Palestinian people".The Platform of the Movement for Black Lives, which speaks for the wider campaign and calls for the “end to the war against Black people”, on Monday issued the campaign's first comprehensive document setting out positions on US federal policies.Platform document addresses mostly American foreign policy, but singled out Israel in light of the billions of dollars military aid given to Israel by the United StatesThe charter states: “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the book that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people”, and added that the US, through its relations with the country, was “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people”.

Pro-Israel and pro-Jewish groups were however quick to condemn the BLM statement.The Jewish Community Relations council based in Boston said it planned to disassociate from any group aligned with Black Lives Matter.

BLM was set up in 2012 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of 17-year old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and to fight for what is says is the "virulent anti-black racism that permeates" American society.Palestinian activists famously used social media to give Black Lives Matter activists tips on how to deal with the inhalation of tear gas, after the police violently cracked down on protests in 2014 that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri following the death by the police of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.  Activists aligned with Black Lives Matter have also frequently visited the occupied West Bank as part of “solidarity tours” aimed at learning about the situation on the ground.Prominent Black artists and actors, including Danny Glover and Lauryn Hill, released a video last year to highlight the connection between African-Americans and Palestinians living under occupation, following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014 that coincided with the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Under the moniker "Black-Palestinian solidarity", the group said it was founded "in the course of resilience against the merciless edge of state-violence, protesters in Ferguson held up signs declaring solidarity with the people of Palestine".Numerous solidarity protests have also been held in London following the recent outburst of protests against police and state violence towards blacks in the US.Activists this morning shut down routes to key transport hubs in Britain, including London's Heathrow airport and a motorway in Birmingham, in protest at deaths in police custody and the deaths of black asylum seekers in immigration detention centres.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the email encryption software PGP, has warned that anyone who uses consumer email services needs to be aware of the threats of exposing their metadata to eavesdroppers.

That risk also led Zimmermann to develop a new feature for his Silent Phone app, encrypting conversations earlier in the call process. Dubbed "tunnelling", the feature hides the knowledge of who is talking to who from any eavesdroppers. Zimmermann had the idea for the feature “quite a few months before the Edward Snowden revelations”, but its upcoming release will be timely. Where PGP flaws are becoming clearer with time, Zimmermann argues that the core technology holds up just as well. “The first thing I did [after the Guardian published Snowden’s leaks] was review my own designs. "I haven't seen anything in the Snowden revelations that suggests that PGP or the stuff we do now is weak in any way.”