The Long Goodbye of Internet Freedom Heralded by CISA
January 8, 2016
The article on MotherBoard titled Internet Freedom Is Actively Dissolving in America paints a bleak picture of our access to the “open internet.” In spite of the net neutrality win this year, broadband adoption is decreasing, and the number of poor Americans forced to choose between broadband and smartphone internet is on the rise. In addition to these unfortunate trends,
“Congress and President Obama made the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act a law by including it in a massive budget bill (as an extra gift, Congress stripped away some of the few privacy provisions in what many civil liberties groups are calling a “surveillance bill”)… Finally, the FBI and NSA have taken strong stands against encryption, one of the few ways that activists, journalists, regular citizens, and yes, criminals and terrorists can communicate with each other without the government spying.”
What this means for search and for our access to the Internet in general, is yet to be seen. The effects of security laws and encryption opposition will obviously be far-reaching, but at what point do we stop getting the information that we need to be informed citizens?
And when you search, if it is not findable, does the information exist?
Chelsea Kerwin, January 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Ins and Outs of Hacking Software
December 23, 2015
Hacking software is and could be a potential problem. While some government agencies, hacktivist organizations, and software companies are trying to use it for good, terrorist groups, digital thieves, and even law enforcement agencies can use it to spy and steal data from individuals. The Technology Review shares some interesting stories about how software is being used for benign and harmful purposes in “The Growth Industry Helping Governments Hack Terrorists, Criminals, And Political Opponents.”
The company Hacking Team is discussed at length and its Remote Control System software, which can worm its way through security holes in a device and steal valuable information. Governments from around the globe have used the software for crime deterrence and to keep tabs on enemies, but other entities used the software for harmful acts including spying and hacking into political opponents computers.
Within the United States, it is illegal to use a Remote Control System without proper authority, but often this happens:
“When police get access to new surveillance technologies, they are often quickly deployed before any sort of oversight is in place to regulate their use. In the United States, the abuse of Stingrays—devices that sweep up information from cell phones in given area—has become common. For example, the sheriff of San Bernardino County, near Los Angeles, deployed them over 300 times without a warrant in the space of less than two years. That problem is only being addressed now, years after it emerged, with the FBI now requiring a warrant to use Stingrays, and efforts underway to force local law enforcement to do the same. It’s easy to imagine a similar pattern of abuse with hacking tools, which are far more powerful and invasive than other surveillance technologies that police currently use.”
It is scary how the software is being used and how governments are skirting around its own laws to use it. It reminds me of how gun control is always controversial topic. Whenever there is a mass shooting, debates rage about how the shooting would never had happened if there was stricter gun control to keep weapons out of the hands of psychopaths. While the shooter was blamed for the incident, people also place a lot of blame on the gun, as if it was more responsible. As spying, control, and other software becomes more powerful and ingrained in our lives, I imagine there will be debates about “software control” and determining who has the right to use certain programs.
Whitney Grace, December 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Mole, Just Data
November 23, 2015
It all comes down to putting together the pieces, we learn from Salon’s article, “How to Explain the KGB’s Aazing Success Identifying CIA Agents in the Field?” For years, the CIA was convinced there was a Soviet mole in their midst; how else to explain the uncanny knack of the 20th Century’s KGB to identify CIA agents? Now we know it was due to the brilliance of one data-savvy KGB agent, Yuri Totrov, who analyzed U.S. government’s personnel data to separate the spies from the rest of our workers overseas. The technique was very effective, and all without the benefit of today’s analytics engines.
Totrov began by searching the KGB’s own data, and that of allies like Cuba, for patterns in known CIA agent postings. He also gleaned a lot if info from publicly available U.S. literature and from local police. Totrov was able to derive 26 “unchanging indicators” that would pinpoint a CIA agent, as well as many other markers less universal but useful. Things like CIA agents driving the same car and renting the same apartment as their immediate predecessors. Apparently, logistics agents back at Langley did not foresee that such consistency, though cost-effective, could be used against us.
Reporter Jonathan Haslam elaborates:
“Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a ‘political’ or ‘consular’ official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.”
In the era of Big Data, it seems like common sense to expect such deviations to be noticed and correlated, but it was not always so obvious. Nevertheless, Totrov’s methods did cause embarrassment for the agency when they were revealed. Surely, the CIA has changed their logistic ways dramatically since then to avoid such discernable patterns. Right?
Cynthia Murrell, November 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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