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Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
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The security alert overseas has been extended to August 10 at least, but now the State Dept. says it is not the result of a new threat, just an abundance of caution. Is that a change in story?
NSA defenders: embassy closures followed pre-9/11 levels of 'chatter'
Closures ordered in response to 'most serious threat in years', says Republican senator Saxby Chambliss
The closure of 22 US embassies over an alleged security threat was seized on by defenders of the National Security Agency on Sunday, amid claims that its controversial surveillance programme alerted authorities to "pre-9/11" levels of terrorist chatter.
A meeting of President Barack Obama's top security officials on Saturday concluded that intelligence apparently gathered from overseas communications intercepts showed a serious but unspecified threat against Western and US interests. The administration moved to shut the embassies across North Africa and the Middle East as a precaution.
On Sunday the state department announced that diplomatic posts in 19 cities will remain closed at least until end of this week. A spokeswoman said the decision to keep the embassies and consulates closed is a sign of an "abundance of caution" and is "not an indication of a new threat."
Iona Craig in Yemen.
Unstable Yemen a greater threat than terrorism
When the US's state department announced over the weekend that its embassies across the region would be shut due to a perceived terror threat, it stopped short of identifying a particular location. "Possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula" was as far as the statement went. Yet many analysts would easily see the implication: Yemen.
There is no more pressing geopolitical problem for the GCC countries than what happens to the Peninsula's largest - and poorest - country. By some estimates, the total number of Yemenis is greater than the total number of citizens of the GCC. That makes the poverty and lack of stability in the country a problem that will eventually be felt in the Gulf countries.
[...]
Mr Obama's solution, drones, is fuelling the problem. The devastation waged without warning or legality on families in villages in the more remote areas of Yemen has added much sympathy, and perhaps many fighters, to the ranks of Al Qaeda - without making Yemenis or Americans safer.
Whoa!
Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
If this in not illegal search and seizure, what is? Plus, it's now being reported that TSA orders car valets to search the cars while they are parked at the airport and owners are away, and if they find anything illegal in the car, including pot, they call the police. So what was the probable cause for searching that car again? What was the probably cause for NSA searching your communications? Emptywheel has long suspected that the govt might do a "sneak and peek" looking at people's metadata and maybe content, find evidence of something, and then go back and get warrants. Makes detective work a hell of a lot easier, huh? Also illegal and unconstitutional. Will the courts clear the way for this? How many honest judges do we have left? This is another reason why I believe that Bush/Cheney/Obama's new surveillance state has ruined the internet as we know it. People are innovative though and it's likely that another will be built but it's pretty difficult since the telecoms are complict.
NSA handing over non-terror intelligence
Current and former federal officials say the NSA limits non-terrorism referrals to serious criminal activity inadvertently detected during domestic and foreign surveillance. The NSA referrals apparently have included cases of suspected human trafficking, sexual abuse and overseas bribery by U.S.-based corporations or foreign corporate rivals that violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
[...]
"We can't task the collection of information for those purposes, and the Department of Justice can't ask us to collect evidence of that kind of a crime," said Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"If the intelligence agency uncovers evidence of any crime ranging from sexual abuse to FCPA, they tend to turn that information over to the Department of Justice," Litt told an audience at the Brookings Institution recently. "But the Department of Justice cannot task the intelligence community to do that."
Litt declined to discuss NSA referrals to the Justice Department when asked about the practice by Hearst Newspapers after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week.
‘Encryption is a human right’: Wikipedia aims to lock out NSA
Wikipedia is taking steps to make its site ‘unsnoopable’ to the NSA following revelations that its site users were being spied on. The measures will include the use of secure encryption for its logged-in users to minimize eavesdropping.
The non-profit US-based organization that manages Wikipedia, Wikimedia, has released a statement, announcing the introduction of HTTPS security protocol on its website to protect its visitors.
“[Wikipedia] believes strongly in protecting the privacy of its readers and editors. Recent leaks of the NSA’s XKeyscore program have prompted our community members to push for the use of HTTPS by default for the Wikimedia projects,” said the statement published on the organization’s website.
Transparency Fail
"Most transparent administration in history" releases most redacted document in history.
After the courts laid out the conditions in which the government can compel email providers to turn over users’ private messages, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wondered if the FBI was applying similar guidelines to text messages. So the group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Justice Department.
In April the organization received an answer that complied with the letter of the law but was almost comically unhelpful. The file contained a memo header, “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones,” followed by 15 pages that were completely blacked out. The document “does not even show the date, let alone what the policy is,” ACLU spokesperson Josh Bell told ABC News.
Jason Leopold has sued the FBI for not responding to his FOIA on Hastings. FBI has also not responded to an MIT researcher, Ryan Shapiro.
FBI sued for keeping secret their file on journalist Michael Hastings
Two investigative journalists are suing the FBI after the government failed to respond on time to a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests filed for details on the death of reporter Michael Hastings.
Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro filed a joint suit on Friday after the Federal Bureau of Investigation neglected to respond to their FOIA requests within the 20-working day period required by law.
Leopold and Shapiro both sent FOIA requests to the FBI following Hastings’ untimely death last month, and are now taking legal action in an attempt to expedite pleas that have so far been ignored by the bureau.
[...]
In a statement published by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Leopold and Shapiro say they’ve retained attorney Jeffrey Light, who in turn filed the motion for summary judgment seeking expedited processing of the federal complaint last week.
A little over a week ago, this article appeared in LA Weekly. They've got the date wrong on this, just as a note, it was the early morning hours of June 18. But there is now a very grainy footage of his car passing by Melrose and crashing. You can't tell a lot about the crash from the footage but there are a couple of things that you can discern. The car was not bouncing or out of control when it crossed Melrose. It was still going straight and very fast. And the explosion was absolutely enormous with some potential ignitions just before the large explosion. A forensics expert could probably draw more conclusions than that but to an untrained eye, those things are clear, which negate a couple of theories about how it happened. The person who provided this video from a nearby store surveillance camera had also reportedly given this video to the LAPD, whose toxicology report should be available soon, one would think.
Michael Hastings: New Surveillance Video Shows Fiery Crash
A new video shows the final moments before journalist Michael Hastings' Mercedes Benz exploded into flames -- with the grainy footage revealing the car's fiery end on Highland Avenue June 19 [it was June 18].
The video was obtained from Weekly contributor Michael Krikorian, whose girlfriend, Nancy Silverton, owns Pizzeria Mozza, which is located at Melrose and Highland just a few hundred feet from the site of the fatal crash.
[...]
Hastings' family has told Rolling Stone that they do not believe he was assassinated. "I don't believe it's a conspiracy," his brother Jeff Hastings said. "There's no part of me that's troubled by that."
Courthouse News Service.
Was FBI Watching Investigative Reporter?
"Since Mr. Hastings' death there has been widespread speculation that the FBI or other United States agencies (including the NSA or CIA) may have been involved in, responsible for, or have undisclosed knowledge relating to Mr. Hastings' death," the complaint states. "Public curiosity about Mr. Hastings' death is linked to the ongoing national and global front page controversy pertaining to the NSA and FBI's potentially illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens, a controversy about which Hastings himself recently wrote and which he continued to research." (Parentheses in complaint.)
Shapiro and Leopold are referring to Hastings' last piece, "Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans."
The complaint states: "Mr. Hastings' death and the related controversies regarding domestic surveillance are matters of widespread and exceptional media interest in which there exist possible questions about the government's integrity which affect public confidence in the government."
Car hacking tricks revealed at Las Vegas
Now they have released a research paper during Las Vegas Defcon 21, a conference for developers and hackers, explaining how they managed to take control of the car and how they kept that control even after their computer was unhooked from the ECU.
They shared the report two weeks before the conference with Ford and Toyota, the manufacturers of the hacked cars (a 2010 Ford Escape and a 2010 Toyota Prius). The goal of the research was to see how far hackers could go once they have gained access to the car controlling system. It does not take into consideration if it the attack is remote or local. That is why Toyota does not consider this hacking; “the company's security efforts are focused on preventing remote attacks from outside the car,” said Miller and Valesek.
Because all cars today are fully electronically controlled, the thread of them being hacked is very much possible. However, a car is not a phone or a laptop, and the amounts of effort required for a very skilled hacker to gain access to anybody’s car are much higher than when trying to steal credit card information. Maybe in the future, as cars become even more automated and more connected to traffic networks, this could become an issue, but for now, it is safe to say that highways are free of viruses.
Now a lot more people know how to hack cars -- a standing room only crowd at Defcon on Friday.
Car hacking code released at Defcon
Car computer hacking hit the gas on the first morning of Defcon 21, as hackers revealed how they took over two of the most popular cars in America.
That was the scary scenario painted over the first two hours at the 21st annual Defcon hacker conference.
[...]
While car hacking made a big splash at Defcon in 2010 and 2011, those hacks were not publicly documented. "We want it to take two months for everybody to do this," Miller said to loud applause from the packed house.
[...]
Prerecorded video demos of the hacks showed Miller and Valasek disabling the car's brakes, jerking the steering wheel back and forth while the car was in motion, accelerating, taking full control of the steering wheel, yanking the seat belt tight, turning off the engine, turning interior and exterior lights on and off, honking the horn, and making the console show a full tank of gas when it wasn't.
What Happens At DefCon Stays With Us All
HTTPS isn’t really so S
Even if some bright mathematician doesn’t destroy online security as we know it, HTTPS still has plenty of other vulnerabilities. The BREACH exploit can use a vulnerability in compression algorithms to pluck email addresses and other data from encrypted connections. A fake termination of a TLS session (note to power users; what you’ve been calling SSL has probably really been TLS for some time now) can lead to the hijacking of a Gmail session (for five minutes) or an Outlook one (for much longer.) Oh, yeah, and client-side TLS sessions appear to be vulnerable too.
[...]
Et tu, Apple?
But at least we can rely on Apple products to stay safe, right? Guess again: if you plug your unlocked iOS device into a charging station, then that station can upload and run arbitrary code on your device – in other words, take it over completely. If you’re a Person Of Interest you’d best think thrice before plugging your iPhone into a hotel charger ever again.
At hacker conferences, government surveillance takes center stage
Black Hat and Defcon are held in the same week -- overlapping by one day, with many of the same people attending both conferences. MacDougall has seen the hacking community experience substantial changes since he's starting attending Defcon. For the most part, hackers are no longer shrouded in secrecy, hiding out from law enforcement.
"When I started it was 'screw the feds,' now it's like 'I want to be a fed.' This year, I think we're now seeing a swing back to the middle," MacDougall told CBSNews.com.
[...]
At Black Hat, where many of the attendees are government employees, jokes were prevalent about NSA surveillance and former Booz Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked national security documents to the media. One booth was giving away temporary tattoos that said, "I am not the fed."
[...]
The attitude was much different at Defcon, where T-shirts bearing Snowden's face, in the treatment Shepard Fairey famously gave to President Obama in the 2008 elections, had the word "hero" written in place of "hope." A similar T-shirt of Obama had the phrase "yes we scan" printed on it -- a play on words from the president's campaign slogan "yes we can."
There are some really amazing photos in this collection. What is your favorite? It's really hard to choose, but the photo of the owl is just incredible!
Winners of the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest
The winning entries in the 25th annual National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest have just been announced. First prize winner Wagner Araujo will receive a 10-day Galapagos expedition for two for his image of competitors in the Brazilian Aquathlon. Collected here are the ten 2013 prize winning photos, plus the Viewers' Choice selection. Photos and captions by the photographers. Also, be sure to see Part 1 and Part 2, earlier on In Focus.
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