Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online

Feds Refuse to Release Public Comments on #NSA Reform — Citing Privacy | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/metadata-reform

Upon review, ODNI has determined the material should be withheld in its entirety in accordance with FOIA exemptions (b)(4) and (b)(6). Exemption (b)(4) applies to confidential proprietary information involving trade secrets and commercial data obtained from a company which, if released, would result in competitive hard to the company. Exemption (b)(6) applies to information which, if released, would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy of individuals.

#fantastique

Data protection : Angela Merkel proposes Europe network
▻http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26210053
▻http://www.lesechos.fr/entreprises-secteurs/tech-medias/actu/0203319192100-angela-merkel-veut-un-reseau-europeen-pour-eviter-aux-donnees

“Above all, we’ll talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic,” she said.

“Rather, one could build up a communication network inside #Europe.”

#régulation_numérique #gouvernance_internet le voilà le « patriotisme numérique » européen rêvés par les #telcos — d’autres diraient « balkanisation » en marche.

How #Silicon_Valley Helped the #NSA | By Abraham Newman | Foreign Affairs (06/11/2013)
▻http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140246/abraham-newman/privacy-pretense

Since the 1990s, companies from Google to Yahoo and Microsoft have done their best to ward off national #privacy rules, calling instead for self-regulation. Early attempts to pass privacy laws, such as the Online Privacy Protection Act in 2000, died thanks to #lobbying by the Direct Marketing Association and the Information Technology Association of America, which represent most of the country’s major information and communications technology firms. The firms have stood behind an older 1997 government framework, “Privacy and Self-Regulation in the Information Age,” which maintained that the best way to protect consumers was to let the technology market handle sensitive issues on its own.

#tech_companies

Why Obama’s NSA Reforms Won’t Solve Silicon Valley’s Trust Problem | Threat Level | Wired.com (17/01/2014)
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/obama-nsa-2

The president himself sent a zinger to the tech companies in his speech, implying that their hands were not exactly spotless: “The challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone,” he said. “Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes; that’s how those targeted ads pop up on your computer or smartphone.”

Maybe the president is sending a message to both the NSA and the Internet companies — a message that the tech industry doesn’t want to hear: We’re in this together.

Cf. ►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/10/SCHILLER/49729

How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet | Threat Level | Wired (v @chaacattac )
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/how-the-us-almost-killed-the-internet/?cid=16711824

Raffa GrandMénage

How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet | Threat Level | Wired (v @chaacattac ) - ▻http://www.wired.com/threatl...

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Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same. - Raffa GrandMénage

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2014/01/ff_nsaskull_large1.jpg

Documents Reveal How the NSA Cracked the Kryptos Sculpture Years Before the CIA | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-cia

When decrypted, it was a paraphrased page taken from the diary of archaeologist Howard Carter describing the opening of a door in King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922 .

Slowly, desperately slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q ( Tut est partout, même à la N.S.A)

According to a former Defense Department cryptanalyst who spoke with Wired, McDaniels was responsible for cracking section three and did it in just six hours lying on his living room couch with paper and pencil after coming home exhausted one day from playing volleyball. McDaniels is now retired from the NSA and declined to speak with Wired about his work on the sculpture. But the source told Wired that McDaniels had been out all day playing volleyball and came home around 10pm.

“He plopped down on the couch in the living room, picked up his draft notes for K3,” the source said. “He had tinkered with it before but could never get into it. He knew it was just basic transposition, so he started with the letter Q and [the letter U after it] and found there were five instances of the letter U, and he just tried all five of those. Then he had to try every other vowel that came after and he finally found something that broke it. By then it was about 4am and he was done .”

#code
#NSA
#surveillance

Snowden’s Contingency: ’Dead Man’s Switch’ Borrows From Cold War, WikiLeaks | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch

Either way, Snowden’s strategy has been described jocularly in the press as a “ dead man’s switch ” — a tactic popularized in movies and thrillers whereby a bomber or criminal mastermind has a detonator wired to a bomb and the only thing keeping it from exploding is his finger on the detonator button. If police shoot him, he releases the button and the bomb goes off.

But Snowden’s case is actually a kind of reverse dead man’s switch , says John Prados, senior research fellow for the National Security Archive and author of several books on secret wars of the CIA.

“As an information strategy, what Snowden is doing is similar to that, but it doesn’t have the same kind of implication,” Prados says. “We’re not setting off a bomb or having some other kind of weapon-of-mass-destruction go off.”

#surveillance #snowden #cyberwar

NSA Transparency Hurts Americans’ Privacy, Feds Say With Straight Face | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/nsa-transparency-effect

Plus de transparence de la part de la #NSA violerait... la #vie_privée des citoyens étasuniens affirme la NSA.

Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Bradford Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general, told the Committee on Privacy, Technology and the Law today that it would have a “privacy diminishing effect” if intelligence officials were forced to review every piece of data vacuumed up under its internet and phone surveillance programs.

“Attempting to identify the numbers of persons or U.S. persons whose communications or information may be incidentally collected would, in practice, have a privacy-diminishing effect directly contrary to the aims of this bill,” they testified in a joint, written statement.

“Attempting to make this determination would require the intelligence community to research and review personally identifying information solely for the purpose of complying with the reporting requirements, even if the information has not been determined to contain foreign intelligence,” they argued. “Such an effort would conflict with our efforts to protect privacy.”

Litt, while addressing the panel, added that such a requirement “would perversely” undermine privacy.

Think Lavabit overreacted ? Think again: there is now proof that FBI extorts root certificates from companies. Cryptography is only as good as the PKI’s physical security and its political environment.

▻http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1nm8nr/new_evidence_reveals_fbi_demands_companies/ccjv26q

For those that don’t remember, Lavabit was Edward Snowden’s email provider, and they shut down their fucking business rather than cooperating with a court order they claimed “would make them complicit in crimes against the American people.” They were bound by a gag order and threatened with jail if they violated it.

Today they won a victory in court and were able to get the secret court order unsealed, and holy shit is it a doozy: the ACLU’s Chris Soghoian called it “the nuclear option.” The court order revealed the US government demanded Lavabit turn over their root SSL certificate, something that allows them to monitor the traffic of every user of the service. Security researchers have argued for years over whether the government would be so heavy-handed as to try this, but there has never been any proof that they actually do, as no one has ever challenged such an order in court.

If a government can force a company to turn over the SSL keys, it breaks the trust model for the entire internet. Everything from google to facebook to skype to your bank is only encrypted by SSL keys, and if the FBI can force Lavabit to hand over their SSL key, they can bet your ass they did the same thing to Google. People don’t understand how big this is from an internet trust model. This story changes everything. No US company that relies on SSL encryption can be trusted with sensitive data, which is what lavabit asserted in their “farewell address” and people thought was an overreaction."

Property and Theft | Jacobin
▻http://jacobinmag.com/2013/09/property-and-theft

The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural #commons by digital capitalists.

#propriété_intellectuelle #digital_labor

Articles à mettre en regard de : ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/178897

Au rayon #transparence pro bono, je demande les #tech_companies en matière d’échanges de données avec la #NSA

Tech Companies Escalate Pressure on Government to Publish National Security Request #Data - NYTimes.com
▻http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/tech-companies-escalate-pressure-on-government-to-publish-nation

On Monday, Yahoo and Facebook each filed suit in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to ask the government for permission to reveal information about the number and types of national security requests for user data that the companies receive. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which filed suit in June to ask for this permission, amended their petitions Monday to compel the government to publish even more detail about the requests.

Les voix (faussement dissonantes ?) de la #silicon_army

NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking

The NSA’s focus on routers highlights an often-overlooked attack vector with huge advantages for the intruder, says Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer at security firm Beyond Trust. Hacking routers is an ideal way for an intelligence or military agency to maintain a persistent hold on network traffic because the systems aren’t updated with new software very often or patched in the way that Windows and Linux systems are.

“No one updates their routers,” he says. “If you think people are bad about patching Windows and Linux (which they are) then they are … horrible about updating their networking gear because it is too critical, and usually they don’t have redundancy to be able to do it properly.”

#NSA #surveillance #routage #infrastructure #cybersécurité via @stephane

Fondé en 1984 par Leonard Bosack et Sandra Lerner, un couple qui travaillait au service informatique de l’université Stanford, #Cisco n’a pas été la première société à créer et vendre des routeurs mais Cisco créa le premier routeur multi-protocoles permettant d’interconnecter des réseaux utilisant des protocoles de communication différents.
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Systems

#silicon_army

Russia Issues International Travel Advisory to Its Hackers | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/dont-leave-home

For roughly two decades Russia has been something of a safe haven for professional spammers, hackers, phishers and fraudsters hitting the U.S with cyber scams. Now the Russian government has some advice for its cyber criminal class, and any other citizens who might be wanted by U.S. law enforcement: Don’t leave home.

#russie #hackers

Maintenant qu’il fournit des accès à haut débit, #google est moins clair sur la neutralité - Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/google-neutrality

Google Fibre interdit à un usager d’installer un serveur au bout de sa fibre... La raison ? C’est un service qu’il veut vendre ! Tags : internetactu internetactu2net fing google #neutralitedunet #netneutrality

Lawmakers Who Upheld #NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash | Wired
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/?mbid=social10181434

The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the house voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.

#lobbying

MIT Moves to Intervene in Release of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File

▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/mit-swartz-intervene/all/1

A la demande du journaliste de Wired Kevin Poulsen, les documents figurant dans le dossier Aaron Swartz devaient être rendu publics.

Mais le MIT vient de repousser la chose au prétexte que des employés du MIT ayant collaboré avec les services secrets et le procureur pourraient être identifiés et ennuyés...

Commentaire de Poulsen :
“I have never, in fifteen years of reporting, seen a non-governmental party argue for the right to interfere in a Freedom of Information Act release of government documents. My lawyer has been litigating FOIA for decades, and he’s never encountered it either. It’s saddening to see an academic institution set this precedent.”

#WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/wikileaks-mole/all

Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/06/Thordarson-01-660x428.jpg

#espionnage #irc #logs

PRISM : Facebook et Microsoft ont reçu 15 000 requêtes de la NSA
▻http://m.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/International/2013/06/15/001-prism-facebook-miscosoft-nsa.shtml

Facebook et Microsoft ont conclu un accord avec le gouvernement américain afin de révéler des informations limitées sur le nombre de requêtes de surveillance qu’elles ont reçues de la part des services fédéraux, afin d’en relativiser l’importance, indiquent des sources familières du dossier.

#prism #facebook #nsa #microsoft #Snowden

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all

What’s in the Rest of the Top-Secret NSA PowerPoint Deck? | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-powerpoint

Also Revealed by #Verizon Leak: How the #NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.
(...)
#Leaks reveal the truth in small slices. In 2006, a technician at an AT&T switching center in San Francisco followed some fiber optic splices straight into an NSA wiretapping program parked on the backbones of the internet. Now someone with access to a single Patriot Act order served on Verizon Business Solutions leaked it to the Guardian, so today’s news is that the FBI and the NSA are engaged in wholesale spying on Verizon customers. But the whole pie is certainly bigger than that.

#free_bradley