Published on May 22, 2013
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it’s the biggest threat to the Internet you’ve probably never heard of.
Category: Security
The reversal was requested in papers [PDF] filed last week in the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia by Cox Communications; Bright House Networks, which is owned by Time Warner; and Verizon.
Wants subscriber names
In the case—AF Holdings v. Does 1-1058 and Cox Communications, et. al.—the copyright holders allege that 1058 “John Does” engaged in file-sharing through BitTorrent of a sexually explicit film.
As part of the discovery process in the case, AF Holdings wants Cox and the other ISPs to turn over to them personal information on the John Does. The order came from a federal district court judge, Beryl A. Howell, a former lobbyist for the RIAA and Senate staffer who worked on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law aimed to protect the rights of copyright holders in cyberspace.
The ISPs are asking the appeals court to overturn Howell’s decision ordering the disclosure of subscribers’ names as part of evidence discovery.
According to the ISPs, AF Holdings and its attorneys aren’t interested in obtaining the names of the alleged infringers to pursue their case in court, but in order to squeeze settlement money from the subscribers.
Related articles
- Porn troll case prompts ISPs to fight to protect customer IDs (pcadvisor.co.uk)
- EU anti-piracy law overhaul under attack; ISPs warn against site blocking, censorship (zdnet.com)
- Cox Communications isn’t joining anti-piracy system (cjonline.com)
- Vampires and Copyright Trolls Suck – The Thompsons LLC v. Does 1-155 (6:13-cv-00469 (OR)) (dietrolldie.com)
- Cox Targets Pirates With “10+ Strikes” Program (informationliberation.com)
- If You’re Still Downloading Copyrighted Material Stop Now (alleywatch.com)
- Guest Post: A look at the new notice and takedown regime under the Copyright Rules, 2013 (spicyipindia.blogspot.com)
- Judge Slams ‘Troll’ Lawsuit Against Illegal Porn Downloaders (embargozone.com)
- Prenda Expert Declaration – AKA: No Absolute Certainty Of Identifying Infringer – 2:12-cv-08333 (dietrolldie.com)
- Courts Want $9,250 Per Pirated Song, But BMG Will Settle For $20 (hypebot.com)
Hackers send fake market-moving AP tweet on White House explosions
WASHINGTON |
(Reuters) – Hackers took control of the Associated Press Twitter account on Tuesday and sent a false tweet about explosions in the White House that briefly sent U.S. financial markets reeling.
In the latest high-profile hacking incident involving social media service Twitter, an official @AP account reported that two explosions at the White House injured President Barack Obama.
AP spokesman Paul Colford quickly confirmed the tweet was “bogus,” and White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that Obama was fine, just minutes after the tweet hit a little after 1 p.m. (1700 GMT).
But within 3 minutes of the tweet’s release, virtually all U.S. markets took a plunge on the false news in what one trader described as “pure chaos.”
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the bogus tweet and its impact on the markets, SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher told Reuters in an interview.
“I can’t tell you exactly what the facts are at this point or what we are looking for, but for sure we want to understand major swings like that, however short it was,” Gallagher said.
Reuters data showed the tweet briefly wiped out $136.5 billion of the S&P 500 index’s value before markets recovered. Some traders attributed the sharp fall and bounce-back to automatic electronic trading.
At a time when cybersecurity and hacking have become top national security concerns, Twitter and its reach to hundreds of millions of users is coming under growing scrutiny for the risk of privacy breaches on the site.
A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army, which is supportive of that country’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, during the two-year civil war, claimed responsibility on Tuesday on its own Twitter feed for the AP hack.
The group has in the past taken credit for similar invasions into Twitter accounts of National Public Radio, BBC, CBS’s “60 Minutes” program and Reuters News.
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on the Tuesday breach, saying the company did not comment “on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” An FBI representative had no immediate comment.
“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” said Stewart Baker, a cybersecurity lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. “AP should have had better passwords, Twitter should have gone to at least optional two-factor authentication months ago, and guys on the Street really should be thinking twice before they trade on Twitter reports. That’s risky.”
For years, security experts have called on Twitter to introduce a two-factor authentication measure, which requires a two-step process to log in and which they say would greatly reduce such breaches.
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Syrian Electronic Army Takes Credit for AP Hack
Tweet claimed Obama was injured in White House attack
By Kristen Meriwether, Epoch Times | April 23, 2013
0 0 0
Screen capture ofA group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army appears to be taking credit for hacking The Associated Press Twitter account and sending out a fake tweet claiming President Obama was injured in an explosion.
The group claimed responsibility by tweeting the following: “Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama pic.twitter.com/HTKoO6gIL6.” Being “owned” is the vernacular in the hacker world for a successful attack.
Linked to the tweet was also a photo of AP’s Twitter banner having been replaced by a Syrian Electronic Army graphic.
The Associated Press Twitter account generated some brief shock waves on Tuesday afternoon, when it sent out a tweet at 1:07 p.m. describing an explosion at the White House. “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”
The Associated Press confirmed the tweet was fake and their account had been hacked.
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Fake AP tweet latest hacking claimed by pro-Assad ‘army’
A tweet by the nation’s largest newswire about a catastrophe at the White House was nearly immediately shot down as false on Tuesday.
By Emily AlpertApril 23, 2013, 2:08 p.m.
A fake tweet that claimed President Obama had been injured after explosions went off at the White House was quickly debunked by the Associated Press, which said its Twitter account had been hacked.
But a band of hackers who support Syrian President Bashar Assad crowed that they had sent Americans into a tizzy.
“This small tweet created some chaos in the United States in addition to a decline in some U.S. stocks,” the Syrian Electronic Army wrote on its website, referring to a brief, steep drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It claimed credit for hijacking both @AP and @AP_Mobile.
Overtaking the news agency on Twitter is the latest in a long string of attacks for which the group has claimed credit. The hackers pledge allegiance to Assad and call the rebellion against his government “an armed insurrection that seeks to lead Syria into a dreadful anarchy.”
Online, the group has waged a cyber war parallel to the real and deadly battles in the streets of Syria, harassing groups that back rebels and media outlets it sees as biased.
Earlier this week, the Syrian Electronic Army claimed to have hacked Twitter accounts for FIFA, the world soccer federation, and its president, Joseph Blatter. The organization has been trying to fend off allegations that Qatar – which backs Syrian rebels – bribed officials in order to host the 2022 World Cup.
Related articles
- ‘White House explosions’ hoax shakes US financial markets (smh.com.au)
- Twitter hoax shakes US markets (theage.com.au)
- AP Twitter feed hacked, sends false message about White House explosion (abc.net.au)
- ‘Bogus’ AP tweet about explosion at the White House sends Dow plunging (telegraph.co.uk)
- AP’s Twitter account hacked; tweet about White House explosions was ‘bogus’ (thestar.com)
- AP Twitter account hacked with fake White House explosion claim (slashgear.com)
- ‘White House explosions’ hoax shakes US markets (smh.com.au)
- Associated Press tweets fake White House explosions after Twitter hack (metro.co.uk)
- Syrian Electronic Army takes credit for hacking AP Twitter account (foreignpolicy.com)
- AP Twitter account hacked allegedly by Syrian Electronic Army; DOW plummets after erroneous tweet of ‘explosions at White House’. (grumpyelder.com)
Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong
As the police manhunt stepped up – some members of the public flocked to sites like Reddit to try and find their own clues
For the past 48 hours, internet users have been working with each other to piece together clues about the culprits of the Boston bombings. The result? They got it wrong – and left innocent people fearing for their safety. Many are now asking: should “crowd-sourced investigations” be stopped?
Thousands have been tirelessly picking through the evidence – every piece of video footage, every photo, every eyewitness account they can get their hands on.
But this investigation wasn’t within the confidential confines of the FBI or local police.
No, these sleuths were working in public – discussing their theories and “leads” within massive communities such as Reddit, 4Chan, Facebook and Twitter.
On Friday, those efforts ended with an apology. After hours of chatter and speculation, the standout suspect identified – and named – was the wrong man.
“I’d like to extend the deepest apologies to the family of Sunil Tripathi for any part we may have had in relaying what has turned out to be faulty information,” wrote Reddit user Rather_Confused.
“We cannot begin to know what you’re going through and for that we are truly sorry.
“Several users, Twitter users, and other sources had heard him identified as the suspect and believed it to be confirmed.
Wrongly accused Sunil Tripathi, 22, has been missing since mid-March“We were mistaken.”
‘Racist Where’s Wally’
In the preceeding hours, Mr Tripathi, who has been missing since mid-March, became a trending topic on Twitter as his name and picture were shared far and wide.
Information had been gathered on a specially created section on Reddit – known as a subreddit – entitled Find Boston Bombers.
Members had been posting their ideas and footage, offering suggestions over what they saw as crucial clues in what has been described as a crowd-sourced criminal investigation.
While undoubtedly set up with noble intentions, innocent people were routinely singled out in pictures captioned with such apparent evidence as “not looking at the race”, or because of sketchy similarities between the rucksacks being worn by onlookers and the bag that contained the bomb.
The New Statesman went as far as to call it a “racist Where’s Wally”, with the suggestion that there was emphasis on pointing out non-whites among the crowds.
One “suspect” was 17-year-old Salah Barhoun, described on Reddit simply as Blue Robe Man thanks to the tracksuit top he had worn.
Users posted information relating to his whereabouts, and pointing out the “sagging” in a shoulder bag he was holding – a sign, some thought, that he was carrying something heavy.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours”
Family of Sunil Tripathi
Hours later, the same pictures that had circulated on Reddit and 4Chan found their way to the front page of the New York Post.
Under the headline “bag men”, Mr Barhoun and a friend were said to be wanted for questioning – but the tabloid added: “There is no direct evidence linking them to the crime.”
The pair were not involved in the bombing – and Mr Barhoun told ABC News he now fears for his life.
There were more: White Hat Black Jacket Guy, Blue Duffel Bag Guy and Green Hat Guy, to share a few.
With each suspect, a rush to find their real identities – and in some cases, social media profiles and groups were peppered with threatening messages.
‘Disgusting’
When the real suspects – as confirmed by the FBI – were identified, the moderators of the Find Boston Bombers group told members that any posts about other people would be deleted immediately.
It meant much of the focus in the subreddit had shifted to the morality of what had occurred.
“This subreddit has been a disaster that has done more harm than good,” wrote Reddit user DarrenGrey.
“It ended up an epicentre of unstoppable finger-pointing and wild conjecture.
“And worst of all the mainstream media leapt on the information here like hungry hyenas.
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Apr 19, 2013 2:15 PM 39,743
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Reddit Wants to Help Find Missing Brown Student It ID’d as Bombing Suspect
After spending the better part of last night dragging Sunil Tripathi’s name through the mud and negligently inflicting emotional distress on his friends and family, Reddit now wants to play a part in helping find the missing Brown student.
Late yesterday, Reddit began to speculate about the possibility that Sunil Tripathi — who was on leave from Brown when he was last seen in Providence, RI, on March 15th — might be one of the two Boston Marathon bomber.
It’s unclear how or why this rumor came to pass, but it ended up being furthered after the claim made a leap onto Twitter when someone claimed that the Boston Police scanner had named Tripathi as a suspect in the case.
That Tripathi’s name was ever said on the scanner is being disputed.
Whatever the timeline, by the early morning hours, Tripathi’s name was trending worldwide, and many had taken to his family’s Facebook page to leave abhorrent messages.
A few hours later, this post was published on the same page:
A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours.
We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil.
We are grateful to all of you who have followed us on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit-supporting us over the recent hours.
Now more than ever our greatest strength comes from your enduring support. We thank all of you who have reached out to our family and ask that you continue to raise awareness and to help us find our gentle, loving, and thoughtful Sunil.
Related articles
- Boston: Internet detectives get it wrong (bbc.co.uk)
- Sunil Tripathi: missing student wrongly identified as Boston Marathon bombing suspect (ndtv.com)
- Why So Many People Accused An Innocent Man So Quickly In Boston (embargozone.com)
- The Internet’s shameful false ID (salon.com)
- The Web’s Failed Hunt for the Boston Bomber (newyorker.com)
- Silicon Alley Insider: Why So Many People Accused An Innocent Man So Quickly In Boston (businessinsider.com)
- Reddit Moderator Apologizes To Family Of Sunil Tripathi (huffingtonpost.com)
- Missing Brown U. student wrongly linked (wpri.com)
- Sunil Tripathi Not a Suspect in the Boston Marathon Bombing (z6mag.com)
- A Reddit Moderator Sticks His Mouth Up His Own Ass Identifying Bomber (bonjublog.com)
The bill still needs to pass the Senate and get Obama’s signature before becoming law
IDG News Service – The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to approve a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill, despite opposition from the White House and several privacy and digital rights groups.
The House on Thursday voted 288-127 to approve the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to share cyberthreat information with private companies. It would also shield private companies that voluntarily share cyberthreat information with each other and with government agencies from privacy lawsuits brought by customers.
[ BACKGROUND: Reddit co-founder calls out Google, Twitter, Facebook over CISPA ]
The bill would still need to be passed by the U.S. Senate before heading to President Barack Obama for his signature. The Senate declined to act on another version of CISPA during the last session of Congress, and earlier this week, Obama’s advisors threatened a veto, although that was before the House approved a handful of amendments intended to address privacy concerns.
CISPA would allow private companies to share a broad range of customer data with each other and with government agencies, privacy groups have complained.
Supporters, however, argued the legislation is needed to encourage better information sharing about active cyberattacks, resulting in better defense of U.S. networks. Federal law now prohibits intelligence agencies from sharing classified cyberthreat information with private companies.
The bill will help protect the U.S. against cyberattacks from China, Iran and other countries, supporters said. Cyberespionage has cost the U.S. tens of thousands of jobs, as foreign companies steal the blueprints of U.S. products, said Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and primary sponsor of CISPA.
“If you want to take a shot across China’s bow, this is the answer,” he said to applause on the House floor.
The bill correctly balances privacy concerns with the need for security, added Representative Dan Maffei, a New York Democrat. Rogue nations and “even independent groups like WikiLeaks” are taking aggressive measures to attack the U.S. power grid, air-traffic control systems and customer financial data, he said.
“Every day, international agents, terrorists and criminal organizations attack the public and private networks of the United States,” he said. “While I do always have some concern that the U.S. government may access our private information in the cyber sphere, I am more concerned that the Chinese government will access our private information.”
The House on Thursday voted for a handful of amendments to the bill intended to improve privacy protections in the bill. Lawmakers approved an amendment designating the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Justice as the primary repositories of cybertheat information shared by private companies, addressing a concern by several privacy groups that CISPA would give the U.S. National Security Agency unfettered access to customer data.
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04/02/2013
CISPA Explainer #1: What Information Can Be Shared?
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:05am
We’ve written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we’re posting in more depth about its shortcomings. Information sharing isn’t offensive per se; it’s really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. First up:
What information does CISPA allow companies to share?
The short answer: any information that “pertains” to cybersecurity, broadly defined to include vulnerabilities, threat information, efforts to degrade systems, attempts at unauthorized access, and more. You can see the full list on page 20 of the bill. You’ll see that it’s not tied to the criminal definition of hacking but instead forges new ground.
The bill sponsors will tell you that CISPA is only about the “ones and zeroes,” but it certainly isn’t drafted that way. There’s nothing limiting CISPA in that manner and personally identifiable information (PII) could be shared right along with some inconsequential code that doesn’t impact privacy at all. So, if your communications or records are somehow caught up in a cybersecurity data dump, they might possibly include information that identifies the real-world you, even if that information is not necessary to combat a cyber threat. Under CISPA, you’ll just have to trust that the corporations holding your very personal information do what’s best. Good luck with that.
Related articles
- Lawmakers Defend Controversial CISPA Bill (tomshardware.com)
- CISPA is back: worst Internet law since SOPA needs you to fight it! (boingboing.net)
- Privacy Group Calls for Changes in CISPA Cyberthreat Sharing Bill (cio.com)
- CISPA voting session slated for this week (zdnet.com)
- CISPA Debate Will Happen Behind Closed Doors (leaksource.wordpress.com)
- CISPA Is Looking Better, But Privacy Proponents Still Aren’t Satisfied (webpronews.com)
- Lawmakers, business execs defend privacy in CISPA (cio.com)
- Intelligence Officials See Cyberattacks As a Top US Threat (cio.com)
- Stephen Lendman – CISPA Is Back (prn.fm)
- The internet says no to CISPA, but will Congress? (constitutioncampaign.org)
Monday, April 8, 2013
Want to Build a Guerrilla Garden? This Crowdsourcing Platform Could Help
Wendy Moore
So you know of an open lot in your neighborhood that would be perfect for a community garden. You really, really want to build one, but you don’t quite know how to pull it off. Let’s be honest—the idea of pulling off a garden build can be pretty daunting. You need a lot of supplies, possibly some funds, and, ideally a bunch of people to help—unless you feel like devoting the next couple weekends to digging.
You’ve heard of barn raising, right? That old tradition of collective community action in which the whole community used to gather together to build a barn for their neighbor. At thrdPlace, a newly-launched local platform for social action, we’re bringing it back by tapping online community to drive on the ground action.
So, think barn raising and replace it with… community gardens, mural creation, or art pop-ups. We help get the word out and recruit people to get involved by sharing the story of your project through the social networks of each person who comes to your project page and clicks to support your project.
What does this look like in real time? This past weekend we helped the Social Justice Learning Institute, a local Los Angeles nonprofit “dedicated to improving the education, health, and well being of youth and communities of color by empowering them to enact social change through research, training, and community mobilization,” to organize and execute 10 backyard gardens at South L.A. homes as part of their 10 Homes–10 Seeds initiative.
Related articles
- Want to Build a Guerrilla Garden? This Crowdsourcing Platform Could Help (activistpost.com)
- thrdPlace wants to help make LA a better place to live (latechrise.com)
- Resources for Starting a Faith Based Community Garden – 2013 (godspace.wordpress.com)
- Guerilla Gardeners and Bragaw-Glenn Community Garden (alaskapublic.org)
- TED Talk -A guerilla gardener in South Central LA (john-king.me)
- Athens-Clarke commissioners want to grow interest in community gardens (onlineathens.com)
- Guerrilla Gardening in South Central L.A. (eatdrinkbetter.com)
This serves as a strong warning to those who value their anonymity. If you aren’t already accessing the Internet through VPN or another deidentifying service, you may be ‘on the list.’ Go silent today! VPN is one effective option. I use TOR. VPN will allow you to use some services that TOR blocks to protect you, but VPN costs money and TOR is free.
Important Message From JWR: The FBI’s Cookie Caper and the VPN Imperative
It has just come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, a sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees were surreptitiously collecting the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months before we moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.
I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers. So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.
Working on my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some cached version histories. (Just about everything is available on the Internet, and the footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are essentially there for a lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the FBI redirects were selected because of a reader’s association with “Intellectual Property” infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload. But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie. However, some of these were direct connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4% of the total.) So if they had kept this practice up long enough and if you visited us enough times then the FBI’s computers would have given you a cookie. This has been verified with sniffer software.
Bad Cop, No Cookies
For your privacy, I strongly recommend that you disable cookies when web browsing. Here are some detailed instructions on how to do so for the most popular web browsers:
•Disabling Cookies in MS Internet Explorer
•Disabling Cookies in Firefox
•Disabling Cookies in Safari
•Disabling Cookies in Netscape
•Disabling Cookies in Google Chrome
•Disabling Cookies in Opera
•Disabling Cookies in KonquerorBut beyond that, more must be done to protect your privacy. You need to be proactive.
Install and Use VPN!
I am now imploring all SurvivalBlog readers to immediately install and use Virtual Private Network (VPN) on their computers. This will allow you to surf the Internet anonymously. Anyone that tries to track web site visitors e-mails will see your visit as originating from one of dozens of anonymous URLs in Europe, or elsewhere in the United States. (With most VPN services, you may pick the city of your choice.) With VPN active, your connection to the Web is “tunneled”, emerging at a far-distant IP address, and it it would be very difficult to track back to your home IP address. Setting up VPN takes just a few minute to accomplish. Once installed, you can set VPN to turn on automatically by default when you start your PC, Mac, or Linux computer. Most VPN providers charge $5 to $20 per month. You can toggle off VPN with the click of your mouse. (You will find this necessary if you visit any of the few web site that disallow overseas IP addresses, such as Netflix). But I recommend that you leave VPN turned on, as much as possible. Set it up to turn on each time that you start up your computer. It is crucial that you use VPN whenever you visit web sites, blogs, and forums that are deemed politically incorrect, or whenever you purchase storage food or firearms accessories on the Web. For those of you that are not tech savvy, ask a friend or relative under age 25 to set up VPN for you. It is not difficult.
Some recommended VPN service providers include:
- StrongVPN ($55 to $240 per year. One of the most flexible in reassigning the far end of your tunnel on the fly. Superior speed.)
- 12VPN ($79 per year.)
- AceVPN ($55 per year. A bare bones service, but one of the least expensive.)
- HideMyAss. (Just under $79 per year.)
- PureVPN. ($75 per year for their basic service.)
(Some reviews of the various services are available here. )
Note that some of the lower cost services might see your connection speed suffer. Your Internet connect will seem noticeably slower than using your original ISP, alone.
It is my hope that in the next two months SurvivalBlog’s site visit map will shift substantially, giving the appearance that most of my readership has moved to Switzerland. Say “Ein Glück, dass wir den los sind” to the FBI’s snooping! It would warm my heart to soon see SurvivalBlog ranked as one of the most popular web sites for readers with Swiss IP addresses.
Beyond VPN
Because government agencies have access to lots and lots of computing power, VPN is not completely impenetrable. It is vulnerable to penetration during the key exchange phase. With the resources available to a state actor, sniffing the entirety of the traffic into and out of a web site is trivial these days. (They can use massively scalable horizontally-scaled virtual sniffers — i.e. using a visualization engine and a template they can keep adding more virtualized instances of a windows or Linux based sniffer program and not even impact the performance of the connections.) I believe that the next loop of the threat spiral in the privacy wars will be Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). But I must clarify that this will become important only for the most high profile media commentators, bloggers, and activists. This is because all the spook legions with all of the mainframe computers in the world simply cannot backtrack everyone’s VPN tunnels. (And, as VPN becomes more and more popular, this supposed goal will become even more elusive.) And if you are high profile, don’t worry. Some very bright people are already working on QKD. Stay tuned.
Our Liberty is Stake
I want apologize for the cost, inconvenience and time required in implementing the foregoing security measures. But you can sleep a little better, knowing that you’ve added a layer of anonymity to your Internet presence. We need to recognize that the early 21st Century is a delicate time for individual liberty. Technology is leapfrogging while at the same time databases are filling at an alarming rate. These databases could provide dossiers on demand, for nefarious purposes. How you vote and how you “vote with your feet” (physically or virtually) are both of tremendous importance. Pray hard. Choose wisely. Act accordingly.
P.S.: For those who are web software savvy, I had originally planned to post the latest version of the actual “foresee-alive.js” Javascript code that the FBI used to attach the cookies. But then it was pointed out to me that ironically, revealing this might constitute copyright infringement, opening me up to a intellectual property lawsuit. That has an odd sort of irony that got me thinking. This predicament somehow dovetails with two bits of history. The first instance is from the First World War: I have read that the U.S. Government paid patent license fees to Mauser before and during the hostilities of the Great War with Imperial Germany. This was because the M1903 Springfield rifle was correctly adjudged a patent infringement on the Mauser Model 1898. During the war, the patent payments continued, conveniently handled by Swiss bankers, acting as middlemen. The U.S. taxpayers paid Mauser of Germany about $1 per rifle plus additional penalties that would have eventually totaled $250,000 USD, up until the U.S. entered the war. It has also been rumored that some payments continued to arrive even after the U.S. Congress declared war on the Kaiser’s Germany. (We’ll have to wait for the release of Jon Speed’s next Mauser book to read the details.) This historical tidbit is just once notch below what happened two decades later when Germany’s Nazi regime had the temerity to sell full fare train tickets to some Jews, to cover the costs of their forced relocation to the designated ghettos before their planned extermination. Oh, but the Nazi bureaucrats were so conciliatory. They only charged children half fare to be sent to their deaths. (If you doubt this, then read the book Fathoming the Holocaust by Ronald J. Berger.)
Related articles
- Japanese student sets up free VPN service (net-security.org)
- Cannot access all network resources over vpn (community.spiceworks.com)
- Spotflux: Finally, A Free VPN (mac.appstorm.net)
- Iran blocks use of tool to get around Internet filter (en.trend.az)
- Japan’s VPN Gate Brings Free VPNs to the Masses (techinasia.com)
Published on Mar 29, 2013
Web users’ online communications may be about to get a wider and possibly unwanted audience. The FBI is seeking more powers to spy on people’s emails and internet chats in real time. The proposals have already been met with criticism, that they are a complete breach of privacy. RT’s Marina Portnaya reports.
Related articles
- Zero Privacy? FBI to spy in real-time on web chats (activistpost.com)
- FBI Pushing Hard for Realtime Email, Gchat, Skype, and Dropbox Spying Powers (gizmodo.com)
- FBI Making Real-Time Gmail Spying “Top Priority” (philadelphia.cbslocal.com)
- FBI Makes ‘Real Time’ Gmail Spying ‘Top Priority’ (latinospost.com)
- FBI Wants The Power To Monitor Emails, Online Chat In Real Time (webpronews.com)
- FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013 (slate.com)
- Real-Time Gmail Spying FBI’s ‘Top Priority’ for 2013 – FBI Once Again Beating CALEA Update Drum (dslreports.com)
- FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013 (blacklistednews.com)
- FBI Pursuing Real- Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013 #privacy (darkactsbible.wordpress.com)
- Do we have any rights left? NO rights to Privacy. FBI spy real time on emails and chats (sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com)
Rebel of Oz – March 15, 2013
This is my eighth year as a full time Internet activist. The longer I’m fighting this “War on Evil”, the more I’m concerned with the effectiveness of resistance. No matter what our cause, liberty, false-flag terrorism, free Palestine, debt-free currency, New World Order, Illuminati, chemtrails, vaccination, cancer cures, drug prohibition, or historic revisionism, we must first and foremost make a conscience decision about what’s more important to us, being right or resisting effectively.
While copyright trolls in the United States are doing their very best to file lawsuits against as many alleged file-sharers as possible, their counterparts in Germany will take some beating.
Hundreds of thousands of Internet account holders have been targeted with so-called pay-up-or-else letters over the past few years and although there are no official figures available, settlements paid run into scores of millions of dollars.
