December 2010
36 posts
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The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired →
For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant...
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Wikileaks, Tor, Betrayal and Conflict of Interest
Those of you thinking Tor helps you, remember wikileaks started with scanning Tor, and Tor’s Jacob Applebaum supports them heavily.
—@zedshaw via Twitter
This tweet set off my alarm bells for a couple of reasons. For one Zed Shaw suggest that Tor doesn’t work. The implied message is that if you think you can trust Tor to provide anonymity, think again. Secondly, @zedshaw...
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Got a net neutrality complaint? Here's what to do →
The Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules are now almost a week old, and the fighting over them has just begun. Republicans vow they’ll kill the FCC’s move in Congress, calling it a blow to personal liberty and small government. Meanwhile the reform outfit Free Press has dubbed the Commission’s Order “Not Neutrality” and a...
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Report Strengthens Suspicions That Stuxnet... →
A new report appears to add fuel to suspicions that the Stuxnet superworm was responsible for sabotaging centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant in Iran. The report, released Thursday by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), indicates that commands in the Stuxnet code intended to increase the frequency of devices targeted by the malware matches exactly several...
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Recording the Police →
I’ve written a lot on the “War on Photography,” where normal people are harassed as potential terrorists for taking pictures of things in public. This article is different; it’s about recording the police:
Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies...
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What is Traitorware? →
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone...
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Paranoid Android: the worst way to complain about... →
After this week’s passage of an open Internet rule at the Federal Communication Commission, some of the Web’s pundits had a tough time deciding whether the agency is more stupid than it is corrupt, or more corrupt than it is stupid. Sadly, all the episode really shows is that bloggers often get a bad rap for good reasons. The accusations started after Engadget read the FCC press...
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Naomi Wolf Misrepresents the Facts of the Julian... →
On Democracy Now this morning, Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf debated the sexual assault allegations that have been lodged against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In the course of the debate, Wolf repeatedly insisted that what Assange is alleged to have done could not have been rape because his accusers never told him “no.” But here’s the thing. According to the published account that Wolf...
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Why everyone hates new net neutrality rules-even... →
It’s no surprise that those who have always opposed net neutrality weren’t pleased with today’s FCC order instituting it—one expects no less—but the sheer vehemence of the objections was still surprising. Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell unleashed a biblical jeremiad against the order, accusing the FCC of becoming a “vigilante” which was taking this...
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Group Publishes Database of Embedded Private SSL... →
A new project has produced a large and growing list of the private SSL keys that are hard-coded into many embedded devices, such as consumer home routers. The LittleBlackBox Project comprises a list of more than 2,000 private keys right now, each of which can be associated with the public key of a given router, making it a simple matter for an attacker to decrypt the traffic passing through the...
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NSA Switches to Assuming Security Has Always Been... →
Keeping enemies out is no longer good enough to protect our nation’s networks At a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, visitors detected a decided shift in U.S. intelligence policy. Where the community had longed focused on keeping out unwanted intruders, the new assumption was that these efforts would eventually fail. And the new...
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Constructive Direct Action Against Censorship →
The past few weeks have highlighted the vulnerability of centralized information systems to censorship: online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Sites hosting legitimate speech were caught up in an anti-counterfeiting raid by the Department of Homeland Security, EveryDNS stopped hosting WikiLeaks.org’s DNS, Amazon refused hosting service to WikiLeaks, and independent...
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The Conservative Case for WikiLeaks →
Lovers necessarily keep or share secrets. Being in a healthy relationship means achieving a certain level of intimacy, where shared knowledge of each others’ weaknesses and insecurities is protected by a bond of mutual trust. Sometimes lovers might do devilish things that outsiders wouldn’t understand, or shouldn’t be privy to, and this is fine. But by and large, what they do is simply no one...
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From Judith Miller to Julian Assange →
Our press somehow got itself on the wrong side of secrecy after September 11th. For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.
Full Article
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A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange →
Suppose that you are taking the bullet train from Kyoto, Japan to Tokyo, as I did yesterday. The woman seated across from you has somewhat unusual facial features. You are curious to know whether she is Japanese, Caucasian, or some mix of both. Suppose furthermore that I asked you to estimate, in percentage terms, the likelihood of each of these three possibilities (ignoring others like that she...
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Your Apps Are Watching You - IPhone and Android... →
Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner’s real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don’t keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. An examination of 101 popular...
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How To Handle Lawyers Threatening You →
(No joke. This is actually how I deal with Lawyers. This isn’t just theory, this is my experience.) Have you ever seen the movie “Monsters Inc.”? It’s a cute animated Disney film about Big Scary Monsters. All day long they go through magical doors, each leading into a bedroom of a young child sleeping at night, and the monster’s job is to scare the shit out of that kid and extract screams for...
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Amazon's latest Kindle deletion: erotic,... →
Amazon may be in the process of stirring up some more trouble for itself thanks to reports that the company is deleting certain kinds of erotica from both the online store and users’ devices. The erotica in question is controversial: it talks about certain acts of incest. Judging from Amazon’s most recent bouts with book “censorship,” users who have already paid for the...
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FBI accused of planting backdoor in OpenBSD IPSEC... →
In an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant “a number of backdoors” in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago. Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers....
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The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About... →
I attend a lot of conferences on media and technology — indeed, they might actually be the biggest growth sector of the media — but the one I attended this past weekend was one of the most fascinating I’ve been to in quite a while. Entitled “A Symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet Freedom,” the one-day event was sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum and was...
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Julian Assange Ate My Balls →
I’m not even sure where to begin talking about WikiLeaks. It feels like the topic has been done to absolute death since the retardedly-named “Cablegate” occurred. I don’t even have the energy to cleverly mock the stupid “-gate” nonsense. This whole saga has essentially sapped my socio-political energy. But god damn it I am going to write something. So much...
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On Consent →
Y’all may have noticed I haven’t said much about the whole Wikileaks thing since this summer. While I strongly support the organization’s stated goal of “opening governments” and the ideals of transparency and justice to which whistleblowers in general are fundamental, I have doubts about the character of the current figurehead, and I’m generally pretty filled with rage about how the media and...
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Al-Awlaki Decision Leaves Key Questions Unanswered →
“How is it that judicial approval is required when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for electronic surveillance, but … judicial scrutiny is prohibited when the United States decides to target a U.S. citizen overseas for death?”
Full Article
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U.S. Celebrates Wikileaks Arrest By Announcing... →
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is arrested on suspicion of rape; today U.S. State Department drops this gem: “The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011 in Washington, D.C.” Oh my. The undercurrent of the rape charges brought by two women in Sweden has been—by some, not all—that they are trumped up in an attempt to...
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Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America →
A truly free press — one unfettered by concerns of nationalism — is apparently a terrifying problem for elected governments and tyrannies alike. It shouldn’t be. In the past week, after publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables, secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has been hit with denial-of-service attacks on its servers by unknown parties; its backup hosting provider, Amazon, booted WikiLeaks off...
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Feds Warrantlessly Tracking Americans’ Credit... →
Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows. The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal...
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Secrets of the "New Music Industry" that the "Old... →
This week’s news that the feds seized 82 websites based on allegations of copyright infringement demonstrated that government website seizures can silence innocent speech. But let’s take a broader view for a moment. The domain seizure debacle, the COICA Internet censorship bill, ACTA, and many other short-sighted efforts to eliminate copyright infringement all depend on (a) the...
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PayPal Announces It Will No Longer Handle... →
In the latest in a series of blows to Wikileaks, PayPal says it will no longer support money transfers to the whistleblower site. PayPal has posted a (late-night) statement to its website, saying: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities...
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FTC's New Privacy Report Endorses "Do Not Track"... →
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission released its long-anticipated privacy report. The report is the final result of a series of FTC privacy roundtables held earlier this year that solicited comments from leading scholars, industry figures and nonprofits including EFF about the consumer privacy challenges posed by new technologies. One of the main focuses of the FTC’s report is...
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Is Publication of Classified Info a Criminal Act? →
When Wikileaks published tens of thousands of classified U.S. military records concerning the war in Afghanistan last July, did it commit a criminal act under U.S. law? That was the question posed by a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service. In the end, the CRS report tentatively concludes that “although unlawful acquisition of information might be subject to criminal...
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Pentagon Papers II? On WikiLeaks and the First... →
Is there a legal angle to the WikiLeaks story? The bottom line: the website WikiLeaks, a site that publishes confidential information, got its hands on a huge trove of classified military field reports from the war in Afghanistan, which it then leaked to three publications: the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The information disclosed paints a bleak picture of the war in...
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The leaked cables make it impossible for Hillary... →
A U.S. diplomat must possess patience, poise, and tact. He must also be attentive to cultural differences, a good observer, and proficient in several languages. When called upon, he must use his skills as a negotiator in the national interest. And, as the latest dump of WikiLeaks tells us, if the dip works for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he must also be prepared to spy on his fellow...
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High court questions broad use of FOIA exemption →
The Supreme Court on Wednesday questioned the government’s broad use of an exemption in the federal Freedom of Information Act to withhold documents from the public. The justices heard argument in an appeal from Glen Milner, a Washington state resident who sued under FOIA for maps showing the extent of damage expected from an explosion at the Navy’s main West Coast ammunition...