via slate.com
20121130
NSA Releases Heavily Redacted Talking Points: Say It's Hard To Watch Public Debate On Its Efforts | Techdirt
After receiving a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Jason Smathers, via Muckrock, the NSA has released a series of "talking points." What's incredible is that the talking points themselves are heavily redacted. Considering they're all about what to tell the press, you have to wonder how they could possibly include anything that should be redacted. It seems that, by definition, the info included in the talking points should be public. The only reason to redact is embarrassment. The snippets you can read are sort of random boosterism about how awesome the NSA is... if only they could tell us.
via techdirt.com
Senate Votes to Curb Indefinite Detention - NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted late on Thursday to prohibit the government from imprisoning American citizens and green card holders apprehended in the United States in indefinite detention without trial.
While the move appeared to bolster protections for domestic civil liberties, it was opposed by an array of rights groups who claimed it implied that other types of people inside the United States could be placed in military detention, opening the door to using the military to perform police functions.
The measure was an amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which is now pending on the Senate floor, and was sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. The Senate approved adding it to the bill by a vote of 67 to 29.
via nytimes.com
20121125
Squid Blacklists - Web Filter - Blacklist - Squid Filter
Our USG blacklist is directed at blocking unwanted communications with United States government networks, intelligence agencies, and military networks. However, You could still visit useful sites such as the social securtiy administration, the us postal service, or your local unemployment office website. This list is not intended to block non threatening, government service type websites that we all use. But it is designed to block the US Government networks that you likely, really do not want traffic from your network reaching. It is a simple CIDR formatted list, so you could use it for your firewall rules just as easily as you can for a squid acl.
20121122
Why Louis Freeh Should Be Investigated For 9/11 | Dig Within
In the summer of 2001, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Robert Wright, a counterterrorism expert from the Chicago office, made some startling claims about the Bureau in a written statement outlining the difficulties he had doing his job. Three months before 9/11, he wrote: “The FBI has proven for the past decade it cannot identify and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States and its citizens at home and abroad. Even worse, there is virtually no effort on the part of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected terrorists residing within the United States.”[1]
Revelations since 9/11 have confirmed Wright’s claims. FBI management did little or nothing to stop terrorism in the decade before 9/11 and, in some cases, appeared to have supported terrorists. This is more disturbing considering that the power of the FBI over terrorism investigations was supreme. In 1998, the FBI’s strategic plan stated that terrorist activities fell “almost exclusively within the jurisdiction of the FBI” and that “the FBI has no higher priority than to combat terrorism.”[2]
via digwithin.net
20121119
Computer Forensics Tool Survey - Tool Search
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.
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This page was last modified on October 26, 2012 at 14:39.
via cftt.nist.gov
20121118
Time to rethink the CIA? - The Washington Post
President Obama should pause before choosing a successor to CIA Director David H. Petraeus and rethink the role of the nation’s primary intelligence agency. Its main focus for the past decade has been fighting terrorists and insurgents.
The first question to ask: Has the CIA become too much of a paramilitary organization? The second: Should this be the time to put the agency’s main emphasis on being the premier producer and analyst of intelligence for policymakers, using both open and clandestine sources?
That doesn’t mean losing its counterterrorism role. Terrorists remain a threat, but the rest of the world is changing so fast that the president and policymakers down the line need the best information available.
More than 20 years ago, Richard M. Helms, the legendary CIA director, told me that one of the biggest mistakes the agency made during his tenure was to run the “secret war” in Laos in the late 1960s. “You can’t keep a war secret, and therefore a clandestine intelligence service should not be running it,” he said. “It also diverts you from doing our main job, analysis.”
BBC News - US high security bio lab faces uncertain future
Plans to build one of the world's most secure laboratories in the heart of rural America have run into difficulties.
The National Bio and Agro defence facility (NBAF) would be the first US lab able to research diseases like foot and mouth in large animals.
But reviews have raised worries about virus escapes in the middle of cattle country.
And rising costs have cast doubts over the project's future.
For over 50 years the United States has carried out research on dangerous animal diseases at Plum Island, just off the coast of New York. However after 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security raised concerns about the suitability of the location and its vulnerability to terrorist attack.
After carrying out an exhaustive search for an alternative, the Department selected Manhattan, Kansas as its preferred location.
via bbc.co.uk
Maker of Airport Body Scanners Suspected of Falsifying Software Tests | Threat Level | Wired.com
A company that supplies controversial passenger-screening machines for U.S. airports is under suspicion for possibly manipulating tests on privacy software designed to prevent the machines from producing graphic body images.
The Transportation Security Administration sent a letter Nov. 9 to the parent company of Rapiscan, the maker of backscatter machines, requesting information about the testing of the software to determine if there was malfeasance.
The machines use backscatter radiation to detect objects concealed beneath clothes. But after complaints from privacy groups and others that the machines produce graphic images of passenger’s bodies, the government ordered the machines be outfitted with privacy software by June to replace the invasive images with more generic ones that simply show a chalk-like outline of a body.
<img class="size-full wp-image-48685" title="tsascannerpic" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/tsascannerpic.png" alt="" width="660" height="790" />via wired.com
20121117
Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side | Foreign Policy Journal
In his important 2006 book, Nemesis, the Last Days of the American Republic, the third and concluding part of a trilogy, the late Chalmers Johnson, who was an expert on Japan and US foreign policy, writes that as much as 40% of the Pentagon budget is “black,” meaning hidden from public scrutiny.[1] If the figure is even approximately correct, and I believe it is, the number is alarming because it suggests that democratic oversight of US military research and development has broken down. In which case our democratic values and way of life are presently at risk; not from without, as there is no foreign enemy that can destroy the US Constitution, but from within.
I would argue that Chalmers Johnson’s estimate was corroborated on September 10, 2001, on the eve of the worst terrorist attack in US history, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged during a press conference that the Department of Defense (DoD) could not account for $2.3 trillion of the massive Pentagon budget, a number so large as to be incomprehensible.[2]
20121110
20121108
Boneh Publications: The most dangerous code in the world: validating SSL certificates in non-browser software
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications. Security of SSL connections against an active network attacker depends on correctly validating public-key certificates presented when the connection is established. We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is completely broken in many security-critical applications and libraries. Vulnerable software includes Amazon's EC2 Java library and all cloud clients based on it; Amazon's and PayPal's merchant SDKs responsible for transmitting payment details from e-commerce sites to payment gateways; integrated shopping carts such as osCommerce, ZenCart, Ubercart, and PrestaShop; AdMob code used by mobile websites; Chase mobile banking and several other Android apps and libraries; Java Web-services middleware - including Apache Axis, Axis 2, Codehaus XFire, and Pusher library for Android - and all applications employing this middleware. Any SSL connection from any of these programs is insecure against a man-in-the-middle attack. The root causes of these vulnerabilities are badly designed APIs of SSL implementations (such as JSSE, OpenSSL, and GnuTLS) and data-transport libraries (such as cURL) which present developers with a confusing array of settings and options. We analyze perils and pitfalls of SSL certificate validation in software based on these APIs and present our recommendations.
20121105
Daily Dot | Inside Par:AnoIA—the Anonymous Intelligence Agency
Paranoia is reputed to destroy you. But if you’re a whistleblower in search of a safe, neutral outlet, it just might save you instead.
Par:AnoIA, short for Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency, is a website designed to collect leaks, allow project participants to work on them, and release them in a way that draws the attention of the public. The Releases section of the site, for example, currently features 1.9 gigs of information from American intel corporation Innodata.
The leaks site developed in part by necessity. WikiLeaks’ touted anonymous submission system has been offline for a year. OpenLeaks never materialized. And Cryptome is... Cryptome, meaning it neither edits nor markets its documents to the public at large.
via dailydot.com
20121104
Judge prods FBI over future Internet surveillance plans | Politics and Law - CNET News
A federal judge has rejected the FBI's attempts to withhold information about its efforts to require Internet companies to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg ruled on Tuesday that the government did not adequately respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Seeborg, in San Francisco, ordered (PDF) a "further review of the materials previously withheld" in the lawsuit, which seeks details about what the FBI has dubbed "Going Dark" -- the bureau's ongoing effort to force companies including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
via news.cnet.com
20121101
The 15 Rules of Web Disruption | The Big Picture
How to Spot – and Defeat – Disruption on the Internet
David Martin’s Thirteen Rules for Truth Suppression, H. Michael Sweeney’s 25 Rules of Disinformation (and now Brandon Smith’s Disinformation: How It Works) are classic lessons on how to spot disruption and disinformation tactics.
We’ve seen a number of tactics come and go over the years. Here are the ones we see a lot of currently.
1. Start a partisan divide-and-conquer fight or otherwise push emotional buttons to sow discord and ensure that cooperation is thwarted. Get people fighting against each other instead of the corrupt powers-that-be. Use baseless caricatures to rile everyone up. For example, start a religious war whenever possible using stereotypes like “all Jews are selfish”, “all Christians are crazy” or “all Muslims are terrorists”. Accuse the author of being a gay, pro-abortion limp-wristed wimp or being a fundamentalist pro-war hick when the discussion has nothing to do with abortion, sexuality, religion, war or region. Appeal to people’s basest prejudices and biases. And – as Sweeney explains – push the author into a defensive posture:
via ritholtz.com
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