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Slavoj Žižek (2015) "I Don't Care About Surveillance"

Snowden kopa da se vrati u Ameriku, ako će da mu garantuju pošteno suđenje.

Evo, da se ne kaže posle da nam nisu rekli:



UK Government Admits Intelligence Services Allowed To Break Into Any System, Anywhere, For Any Reason

QuoteRecently, Techdirt noted that the FBI may soon have permission to break into computers anywhere on the planet. It will come as no surprise to learn that the US's partner in crime, the UK, granted similar powers to its own intelligence services some time back. What's more unexpected is that it has now publicly said as much, as Privacy International explains:

The British Government has admitted its intelligence services have the broad power to hack into personal phones, computers, and communications networks, and claims they are legally justifed to hack anyone, anywhere in the world, even if the target is not a threat to national security nor suspected of any crime.

That important admission was made in what the UK government calls its "Open Response" to court cases started last year against GCHQ. Here's what it reveals, according to Privacy International:

Buried deep within the document, Government lawyers claim that while the intelligence services require authorisation to hack into the computer and mobile phones of "intelligence targets", GCHQ is equally permitted to break into computers anywhere in the world even if they are not connected to a crime or a threat to national security.

Moreover:

The intelligence services assert the right to exploit communications networks in covert manoeuvres that severely undermine the security of the entire internet. The deployment of such powers is confirmed by recent news stories detailing how GCHQ hacked into Belgacom using the malware Regin, and targeted Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards used in countries around the world.

What's important about this revelation is not just the information itself -- many people had assumed this was the case -- but the fact that once more, bringing court cases against the UK's GCHQ has ferreted out numerous details that were previously secret. This shows the value of the strategy, and suggests it should be used again where possible.

Evo, tko još nije pogledao istorijski  intervju Džona Olivera sa Edvardom Snoudenom, nek to učini:


Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Government Surveillance (HBO)


Dilema je ovo: Oliver Snoudenu pokušava da objasni da je bitno da stvari pojednostavi do banalnosti za Joe Sixpack građane koji uopšte ne kapiraju zašto bi bilo strašno to što ih Veliki Brat nadgleda pa insistira na tome da NSA vidi svačiju pišu. Ovo ima logike. Ali ima i logike u tome da Snouden ne želi da priča o ovom elementu cele slike jer je on zaista banalan i može da zakloni važnije delove.

Maestralno! Objašnjenje na praktičnom primeru. Ne vidim ni jednog Amerikanca koji bi mogao ovo da izvede, makar mu i petlja bila obmotana prugama i zvezdama.

изузетан интервју, оливер је знатно порастао у мојим очима

Most Americans Dislike Snowden, But He's Popular Abroad: Poll

Quote
An international poll conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union focusing on the attitudes of millennials toward Edward Snowden found that majorities held positive opinions of him, but more so in Europe than in the U.S., according to U.S. News & World Reports.

The ACLU represents Snowden against U.S. government efforts to prosecute him for violations of the Espionage Act. He continues to dump thousands of pages of classified information about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance activities into the public domain.     
Millennials, ages 18 to 34, tend to view Snowden as a champion of privacy. They see his actions as basically benign, and lean toward thinking that what he did is unlikely to undermine efforts to stop terrorist groups from striking in the West.

Pluralities in some countries, including the U.S., say they are not sure about his impact on terrorism.

Besides the U.S., the poll was conducted in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, France and Australia.

Snowden was most popular among Italian young people, with 86 percent "very" or "somewhat" positive. American millennials were comparatively the least enthused with Snowden's actions, though 56 percent were "very" or "somewhat" positive, according to the ACLU.

U.S. News reported exclusively that 64 percent of Americans of all ages surveyed hold a negative opinion of Snowden and 36 percent a positive one — of these, 8 percent are very positive.

The older the group of Americans are, the less favorable their views on Snowden. Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, U.S. News reported.                
Snowden, who worked as a private contractor at the NSA, fled the U.S. on May 20, 2013. Through collaborators Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, he began releasing purloined classified information about phone and Internet intercepts in June. He arrived in Moscow on June 23 and was soon granted asylum by President Vladimir Putin.

From Moscow, Snowden continues to disseminate information about the U.S. and its allies. In February, he made public that the Israeli, American and British intelligence services were coordinating efforts to track the activities of leaders in the Islamic Republic of Iran because of suspicions about that country's nuclear weapons program, Haaretz  reported.

The younger generation opposes government agencies tracking them  online or collecting data about their phone calls, said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, according to U.S. News.

"It is unlikely this generation of digital natives will shed a fundamental commitment to the free exchange of information" even when they grow older, Romero wrote in a 

Evo kome se čita, detalji o programu Stellarwind koji je imao sve odlike moderne prisluškivačke priče: kršenje ustava, široko zabačena mreža u koju se hvataju krivi i nevini, al pretežno nevini itd.


Government Releases Once-Secret Report on Post-9/11 Surveillance


Spojlr alrt: izveštaj tvrdi da je ova vrsta špijuniranja sopstvenih građana neefikasna.

Holy Trinity of whistleblowers: Statues of Assange, Snowden and Manning go up in Berlin (VIDEO)

Quote
One of the German capital's central squares has become the stage for a provocative art piece, which not only celebrates whistleblowers, but encourages other ordinary citizens to speak out.
"They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth," Italian sculptor Davide Dormino told the media in Berlin's Alexanderplatz.
The life-sized statues of the three whistleblowers stand upon three chairs, as if speaking in an impromptu public meeting. Next to them is a fourth, empty chair.
For Dormino, who titled his piece, Anything to Say? this is the centerpiece of the composition.
"The fourth chair is open to anyone here in Berlin who wants to get up and say anything they want," he told Deutsche Welle.


Dozens of people, including children, have already overcome their fears, and stood up on the platform, some with a loudspeaker.
"People are saying many different things. From politics to babbling to silence, from people who desperately are wanting to help Julian, Bradley and Edward to people who have no idea who they are. This chair is, I guess, a place of free speech," said Dormino.



Bradley Manning, who leaked US diplomatic cables in 2011, is serving a 35-year sentence in a military prison. Manning has since changed her gender to female, and is now known as Chelsea. However, she is presented in her former guise as a male US soldier in the composition. Julian Assange, who hosted Manning's files on his Wikileaks website, remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, aware that leaving it may leave him exposed to extradition to the US. Former intelligence agent Edward Snowden, who revealed the intricacies and reach of NSA surveillance technologies, has been marooned in an undisclosed location in Russia for nearly two years.



Dormino, who came up with the idea together with the US journalist Charles Glass, specifically chose a classical bronze statue for his depiction – and not an installation or abstract piece – since statues are usually made of establishment figures. For the Rome-based artist, this is an injustice – while men who order others to their deaths get immortalized, those who resist are often forgotten, so "the statue pays homage to three who said no to war, to the lies that lead to war and to the intrusion into private life that helps to perpetuate war."
Dormino says he will now tour the world's most prominent public places with his exhibit, recording the opinions or ordinary citizens across the globe. One place he may not be welcome is the US: an unapproved bust of Snowden, placed in a New York park last month, was removed within hours.

http://youtu.be/kWn5XxijJJI

 Kolko je do njega bilo, on je uradio...

Obama signs bill reforming surveillance program

Quote
              WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday legislation passed by Congress earlier in the day reforming a government surveillance program that swept up millions of Americans' telephone records.
Reversing security policy in place since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the bill ends a system exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The spy agency collected and searched records of phone calls looking for terrorism leads but was not allowed to listen to their content.
Passage of the USA Freedom Act, the result of an alliance between Senate Democrats and some of the chamber's most conservative Republicans, was a victory for Obama, a Democrat, and a setback for Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
After the Senate voted 67-32 on Tuesday to give final congressional approval to the bill, Obama used his Twitter account, @POTUS, to say he was glad it had passed. "I'll sign it as soon as I get it," the tweet said.
Before voting, senators defeated three amendments proposed by Republican leaders after they reversed themselves and ended efforts to block it. The House of Representatives passed the measure overwhelmingly last month.
              In the end, 23 Senate Republicans voted for the Freedom Act, joining 196 who backed it in the House. In a rift between Republicans, who control both chambers, House leaders had warned that amendments proposed by McConnell would be a "challenge" for the House that could delay the bill.
              A federal appeals court on May 7 ruled the collection of "metadata" illegal.
The new law would require companies such as Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc, to collect and store telephone records the same way that they do now for billing purposes.
But instead of routinely feeding U.S. intelligence agencies such data, the companies would be required to turn it over only in response to a government request approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The Freedom Act is the first major legislative reform of U.S. surveillance since Snowden's revelations two years ago this month led to debate over how to balance Americans' distrust of intrusive government with fears of terrorist attacks.
Along with the phone records program, two other domestic surveillance programs authorized under the 2001 USA Patriot Act have been shut down since Sunday.
              MISSED DEADLINE
              After Republican Senator Rand Paul, a 2016 presidential candidate, blocked McConnell's efforts to keep them going temporarily, the Senate missed a deadline to extend legal authorities for certain data collection by the NSA and the FBI.
              McConnell made an unusually strong last-ditch argument against the Freedom Act after his amendments failed. "It surely undermines American security by taking one more tool from our war fighters, in my view, at exactly the wrong time," he said in a Senate speech.
Telephone companies had been less than thrilled about potentially overhauling their record-keeping systems to become the repositories of surveillance records.
              Together with civil liberties groups, they opposed specific requirements for how long they must retain any data, which were proposed in some amendments that were later defeated. A Verizon official, for instance, spoke in support of the Freedom Act, without such a mandate, in a Senate hearing last year.
              After the vote, Microsoft Corp General Counsel Brad Smith praised Congress. "Today's vote by the Senate on the USA Freedom Act will help to restore the balance between protecting public safety and preserving civil liberties," Smith said in a statement.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Senate privacy advocate, voted for the Freedom Act. He pledged that he and his allies would continue pushing for more limits on surveillance.
"This has always been about reforming intelligence policies that do not make America safer and threaten our liberties," Wyden told reporters.
              The American Civil Liberties Union said the Freedom Act was a milestone, but did not go far enough. "The passage of the bill is an indication that comprehensive reform is possible, but it is not comprehensive reform in itself," ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement.
              A senior U.S. intelligence official said the bulk telephone data collection system had been shut down since shortly before 8 p.m. EDT on Sunday.   
It was not immediately clear how soon the NSA program would be restarted. The Freedom Act allows it to continue for six months while the new system is established.
              The White House said the administration would move quickly to get it up and running again.
With Obama's signing of the bill, the executive branch will have to apply to the surveillance court for reauthorization.

Taj luckasti EfBiAj:



Congress Didn't Notice the FBI Creating a 'Small Air Force' for Surveillance


Last week, Americans learned that even as the NSA collected information on their telephone and Internet behavior, the FBI was using fictitious companies to secretly operate what the AP called "a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cell phone surveillance technology."
The news organization reported that surveillance flights may be more than a decade old, and identified "more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas."
The merits of this program will now be debated.
What's already clear, however, is the anti-democratic nature of keeping it hidden all these years. The U.S. is supposed to be governed by the people. Whether Americans want a federal law-enforcement agency using planes to conduct surveillance on vast swaths of the country is a question properly aired and debated.

It is for Americans to choose.Instead, an executive branch that has grown alarmingly powerful since the September 11 terrorist attacks, or perhaps even before, imposed its preferred policy in secret. The vast majority of Americans were completely unaware of its choice.
This made voter accountability on the issue impossible.
And many of the FBI's ostensible overseers in Congress don't know much more than the public, either. This is evident from letters that legislators have written in recent days. Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, demanded to be briefed no later than this week on "the scope, nature, and purpose of these operations... and what legal authorities, if any, are being relied upon in carrying out these operations."
Sixteen House members wrote to the FBI, pointing out that the president had just signed a reform ending the bulk collection of phone records. "It is highly disturbing," they wrote, "to learn that your agency may be doing just that and more with a secret fleet of aircraft engaged in surveillance missions." They asked for the FBI to identify the legal theory used to justify the flights, the circumstances surrounding them, the technologies on the aircraft, the privacy policy used for data collected, and the civil liberties safeguards that had been put in place.


Senator Al Franken has posed ten questions of his own to the FBI:

   
• What technologies are used by the FBI during the course of aerial surveillance? To what extent does the FBI use IMSI-catchers, "DRTBoxes," "dirtboxes," or "Stingrays"? To what extent does the FBI use infrared cameras? To what extent does the FBI use video cameras?​​
• How frequently does the FBI engage in aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? In what types of operations does the FBI deploy aerial surveillance utilizing these technologies? More generally, under what circumstances is aerial surveillance using these technologies deployed?
• Under what legal authority is the FBI acting when conducting aerial surveillance, including aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? To the extent that the Department of Justice is seeking court approval before deploying any of these technologies during aerial surveillance, is this done on a case-by-case basis or does the Department seek broader authorization? What are judges told about how the technologies deployed work, and the potential impact on innocent Americans? Please provide a representative sample of the applications for these court orders.
• To the extent that the Department of Justice has developed policies governing the use of IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology during aerial surveillance, please identify the policies and legal processes used. Are different technologies subject to different policies or forms of legal process? If so, please describe the application of these policies.
• Has the Department of Justice developed policies on the retention of data collected in the course of aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? Has the Department developed policies on the destruction of that data? If so, please describe these policies.
• How many individuals can be detected, tracked, and/or monitored during each surveillance flight? If IMSI-catchers are being used, how many phones can be detected, tracked, and/or monitored during each flight?
• Reports indicate that some of the surveillance systems have the capability of blocking phone calls, including 911 and other emergency calls. What steps have been taken to ensure that hone calls of non-targeted civilians are not interrupted by the FBI's aerial surveillance?
• To the extent that aerial surveillance has been deployed above large public gatherings, what steps is the government taking to ensure that such surveillance does not chill constitutionally protected conduct, such as political and religious activity?
• Has the Department of Justice's Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties conducted a privacy impact assessment or otherwise reviewed the use of technologies utilized during aerial surveillance? Has a review or privacy impact assessment been conducted on the FBI's use of aerial surveillance more broadly? If so, please provide copies of such assessments or reviews.
• What safeguards are in place to ensure innocent Americans' privacy is protected during aerial surveillance utilizing technology that collects data and personal information?

Shame on the FBI for not informing the public and the full Congress about this program. And shame on legislators for being so clueless about surveillance flights run for years by a law-enforcement agency which they are responsible for overseeing. The fact that questions about legal authorities and privacy are just now being raised is yet another indication that legislators have been derelict in their duties.

Ova najnovija pizdarija oko toga da su Kinezi i Rusi "dobili" od Snoudena tajne podatke je naravno zanimljiva. Glen Grinvold:


The Sunday Times' Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst — and Filled with Falsehoods

Heh, kad prisluškujete Francuze, očekujte posledice 

French Justice Minister Says Snowden and Assange Could Be Offered Asylum

Quote

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira thinks National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange might be allowed to settle in France.

If France decides to offer them asylum, she would "absolutely not be surprised," she told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday (translated from the French). She said it would be a "symbolic gesture."

Taubira was asked about the NSA's sweeping surveillance of three French presidents, disclosed by WikiLeaks this week, and called it an "unspeakable practice."

Her comments echoed those in an editorial in France's leftist newspaper Libération Thursday morning, which said giving Snowden asylum would be a "single gesture" that would send "a clear and useful message to Washington," in response to the "contempt" the U.S. showed by spying on France's president.

Snowden, who faces criminal espionage charges in the U.S., has found himself stranded in Moscow with temporary asylum as he awaits responses from two dozen countries where he'd like to live; and Assange is trapped inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden. (See correction below.)

Taubira, the chief of France's Ministry of Justice, holds the equivalent position of the attorney general in the United States. She has been described in the press as a "maverick," targeting issues such as poverty and same-sex marriage, often inspiring anger among French right-wingers.

Taubira doesn't actually have the power to offer asylum herself, however. She said in the interview that such a decision would be up to the French president, prime minister and foreign minister.  And Taubira just last week threatened to quit her job unless French President François Hollande implemented her juvenile justice reforms.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article improperly described the state of Assange's case in Sweden and his reason for avoiding extradition. He has refused to go to Sweden, where he faces accusations of sexual assault, because he fears he could then be extradited to the United States.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Plot se zgušnjava:


Surveillance Court Rules That N.S.A. Can Resume Bulk Data Collection

Quote
WASHINGTON —  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans' domestic phone calls in bulk.
But the American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday that it would ask the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had ruled that the surveillance program was illegal, to issue an injunction to halt the program, setting up a potential conflict between the two courts.
The program lapsed on June 1, when a law on which it was based, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, expired. Congress revived that provision on June 2 with a bill called the USA Freedom Act, which said the provision could not be used for bulk collection after six months.


The six-month period was intended to give intelligence agencies time to move to a new system in which the phone records — which include information like phone numbers and the duration of calls but not the contents of conversations — would stay in the hands of phone companies. Under those rules, the agency would still be able to gain access to the records to analyze links between callers and suspected terrorists.
But, complicating matters, in May the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled in a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. that Section 215 of the Patriot Act could not legitimately be interpreted as permitting bulk collection at all.
Congress did not include language in the Freedom Act contradicting the Second Circuit ruling or authorizing bulk collection even for the six-month transition. As a result, it was unclear whether the program had a lawful basis to resume in the interim.
After President Obama signed the Freedom Act on June 2, his administration applied to restart the program for six months. But a conservative and libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks, filed a motion in the surveillance court saying it had no legal authority to permit the program to resume, even for the interim period.
In a 26-page opinion made public on Tuesday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican. And Judge Mosman said the Second Circuit was wrong, too.
"Second Circuit rulings are not binding" on the surveillance court, he wrote, "and this court respectfully disagrees with that court's analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the USA Freedom Act."
When the Second Circuit issued its ruling that the program was illegal, it did not issue any injunction ordering the program halted, saying it would be prudent to see what Congress did as Section 215 neared its June 1 expiration. Jameel Jaffer, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, said on Tuesday that the group would now ask for one.
"Neither the statute nor the Constitution permits the government to subject millions of innocent people to this kind of intrusive surveillance," Mr. Jaffer said. "We intend to ask the court to prohibit the surveillance and to order the N.S.A. to purge the records it's already collected." Advertisement
Continue reading the main story  Advertisement
Continue reading the main story   Advertisement
Continue reading the main story The bulk phone records program traces back to October 2001, when the Bush administration secretly authorized the N.S.A. to collect records of Americans' domestic phone calls in bulk as part of a broader set of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts.
The program began on the basis of presidential power alone. In 2006, the Bush administration persuaded the surveillance court to begin blessing it under of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which says the government may collect records that are "relevant" to a national security investigation.
The program was declassified in June 2013 after its existence was disclosed by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.
It remains unclear whether the Second Circuit still considers the surveillance program to be illegal during this six-month transition period. The basis for its ruling in May was that Congress had never intended for Section 215 to authorize bulk collection.
In his ruling, Judge Mosman said that because Congress knew how the surveillance court was interpreting Section 215 when it passed the Freedom Act, lawmakers implicitly authorized bulk collection to resume for the transition period.
"Congress could have prohibited bulk data collection" effective immediately, he wrote. "Instead, after lengthy public debate, and with crystal-clear knowledge of the fact of ongoing bulk collection of call detail records," it chose to allow a 180-day transitional period during which such collection could continue, he wrote.
The surveillance court is subject to review by its own appeals panel, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Both the Second Circuit and the surveillance review court are in turn subject to the Supreme Court, which resolves conflicts between appeals courts.
Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a written statement that the Obama administration agreed with Judge Mosman.
Since the program was made public, plaintiffs have filed several lawsuits before regular courts, which hear arguments from each side before issuing rulings, unlike the surveillance court's usual practice, which is to hear only from the government. Judge Mosman's disagreement with the Second Circuit is the second time that the surveillance court has rejected a contrary ruling about the program by a judge in the regular court system.
In a lawsuit challenging the program that was brought by the conservative legal advocate Larry Klayman, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia ruled in December 2013 that the program most likely violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
But in March 2014, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, a Federal District Court judge who also sits on the secret surveillance court, rejected Judge Leon's reasoning and permitted the program to keep going. The Obama administration has appealed Judge Leon's decision to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The Freedom Act also contains a provision saying that whenever the surveillance court addresses a novel and significant legal issue, it must either appoint an outside "friend of the court" who can offer arguments contrary to what the government is saying, or explain why appointing one is not appropriate.
The first test of that reform came last month when another judge on the court, F. Dennis Saylor IV, addressed a separate issue raised by the passage of the Freedom Act. Judge Saylor acknowledged that it was novel and significant, but declined to appoint an outside advocate, saying the answer to the legal question was "sufficiently clear" to him without hearing from one.

Has This Man Unlocked The Secret To Internet Anonymity?

 Whoa.
Swedish prosecutors drop Assange sexual assault probe

QuoteStockholm (AFP) - Swedish prosecutors dropped a sexual assault probe against Julian Assange on Thursday, but the move failed to placate the Wikileaks founder who still faces a rape claim.


Two of the four allegations against the Australian -- who has been holed up at Ecuador's London embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition -- have reached their statute of limitations after five years.
"Now that the statute of limitations has expired on certain offences, I am obliged to drop part of the investigation," prosecutor Marianne Ny said.
But she said she still wanted to question the 44-year-old over the more serious claim of rape.
The accusations dropped involve one count of sexual assault and another of unlawful coercion. A separate allegation of sexual molestation will run out on August 18.
The Australian can still however be prosecuted for rape, which carries a 10-year statute of limitations that expires in 2020.


Assange has always denied the allegations brought by two Swedish women, and insists the sexual encounters were consensual.
"I am extremely disappointed. There was no need for any of this. I am an innocent man," Assange said in a statement after the prosecutor's decision.
- Unable to access embassy -
He accused her of being "beyond incompetence" for failing to going to the Ecuador embassy to take his statement or to pledge he would not be sent to the United States.
A member of his legal team, Baroness Helena Kennedy of Britain, also took aim at the Swedish prosecution.


"The evidence would never have stood in any court of law worthy of its name," she said in a statment, adding: "The remaining allegation is just as unlikely to lead to conviction."
Under Swedish law, if a suspect is not questioned before the deadline on the case expires, they can no longer be tried for the alleged crimes.
Despite repeated attempts, prosecutors say they have been unable to gain access to Ecuador's embassy.
They initially insisted Assange return to Sweden for interrogation -- a condition he rejected for fear Stockholm could deliver him to US authorities, who may try him for leaking nearly 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010.
In a U-turn in March, prosecutors agreed to Assange's compromise offer to question him inside the London mission but say they have yet to see their request approved by Ecuador because of procedural issues -- leading critics to suspect Quito of playing the clock.


Attorneys for Assange however say suspicions Ecuador is using delaying tactics are unfounded.
"The (Swedish) request came in late and is being processed by Ecuador, which will certainly approve it after following its own procedures," Assange's Swedish lawyer Per Samuelsson told AFP earlier this month.
Claes Borgstrom, a lawyer for one of the two women accusing Assange of assault in 2010, said his client was trying to come to terms with the likelihood that the case will never be tried.
- 'Weight lifted' -
"She has always been ready to stand by her accusations and wanted to bring the case to court. But at the same time a weight has been lifted. This has been dragging on for five years and she wants to go back to her normal life," he told the daily Dagens Nyheter earlier this week.
Assange has compared living inside the embassy -- which has no garden but is in the plush Knightsbridge district, near Harrods department store -- to life on a space station.
His room, which measures 15 feet by 13 feet (4.5 by 4 metre), is divided into an office and a living area. He has a treadmill, a shower, a microwave and a sun lamp and spends most of his day at his computer.
Assange is subject to a European arrest warrant. Britain has vowed to detain him if he sets foot outside the embassy, which is under constant police surveillance.

U.S. Appeals Court Overturns Decision That NSA Metadata Collection Was Illegal

Quote
A three-judge panel for a U.S. appeals court has thrown out a lower-court decision that sought to stop the NSA from continuing to collect metadata on phone calls made by Americans.
The lower court ruling had found that the practice was unconstitutional.
In some ways, this decision is much less important now that Congress has passed a law that changes the way metadata is collected by the government. If you remember, after a fierce battle, both houses of Congress voted in favor of a law that lets phone companies keep that database but still allows the government to query it for specific data.
The three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia still decided to take on the case, because that new program doesn't begin until 180 days after the date that law was enacted (June 2, 2015).
Until then, and as a result of this decision, the NSA is allowed to continue with its metadata collection program.
The court reversed a decision by Judge Richard Leon and sent it back to him for further proceedings.
This court did not make its decision on Constitutional terms; instead, it ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing to receive a preliminary injunction. The court sent the case back to Judge Leon to see if the plaintiffs could cobble up more evidence showing they are being directly targeted by the bulk collection program.
The complication there is the U.S. government has in the past refused to turn over that evidence, claiming it is secret.
 

Snowden joins Twitter, follows NSA

Teen hacker says he cracked CIA head's personal email: media

Quote
Washington (AFP) - A teenaged hacker broke into CIA Director John Brennan's personal email account and swiped sensitive files including a top-secret application for a security clearance, the New York Post reported.
If true, the story will be a major embarrassment for Brennan and the Central Intelligence Agency, coming after months of intense national scrutiny of Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
The Post said a hacker, describing himself as an American high school student, had called the newspaper to describe his exploits.
Stored on Brennan's private email account were a range of sensitive files including his 47-page application for the security clearance, the hacker told The Post in a story Sunday.
In a series of tweets from his purported Twitter account -- @phphax -- the hacker taunted authorities and showed redacted images of what appeared to be sensitive government information.
The account references "CWA." The hacker told the Post this stood for "Crackas With Attitude," which he said referred to him and a classmate.
The man said he was not Muslim but carried out the hack because he opposed US foreign policy and supported Palestine.
As well as cracking Brennan's personal AOL account, he claimed to have targeted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, accessing his Internet provider account and listening to his voicemails.
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday but told the Post it had "referred the matter to the appropriate authorities."
A Homeland Security spokesman told AFP: "We are aware of the media report, however as a matter of policy, we do not comment on the Secretary's personal security."
According to CNN, the FBI and Secret Service are investigating the report.
The Post said the alleged hacker told them he accessed the account by using a process called "social engineering" in which he tricked Verizon workers into divulging Brennan's personal information then convinced AOL to reset his password.
The hacker told the newspaper he had even prank-called America's top spy and taunted him by reciting Brennan's Social Security number.
"He waited a tiny bit and hung up," the hacker told the Post.
The government is still reeling after hackers this summer breached US government databases and stole personal information from background checks of 21.5 million people.

Bura u čaši vode koji je izazvala pomisao da nas po internetu prate & špijuniraju kojekakve nacionalne službe bi verovatno bila veća da nismo svesni da veliki deo svojih intimnih informacija već svojevoljno (ili makar blago škrgućući zubima) poveravamo privatnom sektoru. Danas je "big data" big biznis, ali evo teksta koji procenjuje koliko zapravo vredi tržište trgovanja velikim količinama privatnih podataka koje o ljudima skupljaju mobilni provajderi u SAD. Spojlr alrt: 24 milijarde dolara godišnje.

UK policija kaska za srpskom koja ove opcije već ima: UK police to get powers to check public's web browsing history

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The government's new surveillance bill plans to give police the power to access the web browsing history of anyone in the UK. Under the proposal, telecoms and internet service providers will be legally required to retain their customers' web browsing history for a period of 12 months that enforcement agencies can then use in their investigations.

The communication firms will be paid to log their customers' emails, internet use and other correspondence so that they can be easily searched by security officials, namely the police, the National Crime Agency, the intelligence agencies and even the HM Revenue and Customs.

The proposal will allow the police to seize details of the website and access specific web addresses visited by anyone. However, they will need to get judicial approval to access the content of the websites. The bill is set to be introduced by Home Secretary Theresa May in the House of Commons on Wednesday (4 November).

"I've said many times before that it is not possible to debate the balance between privacy and security, including the rights and wrongs of intrusive powers and the oversight arrangements that govern them without also considering the threats that we face as a country," May was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

"Those threats remain considerable and they are evolving. They include not just terrorism from overseas and home-grown in the UK, but also industrial, military and state espionage. They include not just organised criminality, but also the proliferation of once physical crimes online, such as child sexual exploitation. And the technological challenges that that brings. In the face of such threats we have a duty to ensure that the agencies whose job it is to keep us safe have the powers they need to do the job," she said.

David Davis MP, who said the police are trying to revive a power that parliament has already rejected, told The Times: "It's extraordinary they're asking for this again, they are overreaching and there is no proven need to retain such data for a year."

"Prove their case — not just assert that they need it," he added. Britain would be "setting a worrying international precedent" if the proposal under the new bill gets the go ahead, former deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg warned. Also, three-quarters of people who took a survey, which was conducted by YouGov for Big Brother Watch, did not trust that the data would be kept secret. Back in 2012, the Liberal Democrats, which was part of the government coalition, had blocked a similar proposal in the so-called snooper's charter.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron is looking at ways to strengthen the pact with the US to ensure that US-based internet companies hand over data of suspects when requested. News of the proposal comes barely a week after data security breaches were reported in several UK companies, including TalkTalk.

Mass surveillance: EU citizens' rights still in danger, says Parliament

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  Too little has been done to safeguard citizens' fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They urge the EU Commission to ensure that all data transfers to the US are subject to an "effective level of protection" and ask EU member states to grant protection to Edward Snowden, as a "human rights defender". Parliament also raises concerns about surveillance laws in several EU countries.

This resolution, approved by 342 votes to 274, with 29 abstentions, takes stock of the (lack of) action taken by the European Commission, other EU institutions and member states on the recommendations set out by Parliament in its resolution of 12 March 2014 on the electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens, drawn up in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.

By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decided to call on EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender".

Data transfers to the US

MEPs welcome the 6 October ruling by the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) in the Schrems case, which invalidated the Commission's decision on the Safe Harbour scheme for data transfers to the US. "This ruling has confirmed the long-standing position of Parliament regarding the lack of an adequate level of protection under this instrument", they say.

Parliament calls on the Commission to "immediately take the necessary measures to ensure that all personal data transferred to the US are subject to an effective level of protection that is essentially equivalent to that guaranteed in the EU". It invites the Commission to reflect immediately on alternatives to Safe Harbour and on the "impact of the judgment on any other instruments for the transfer of personal data to the US, and to report on the matter by the end of 2015". The resolution also reiterates a call to suspend the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) agreement with the US.

In general, MEPs consider the Commission's response so far to Parliament's 2014 resolution "highly inadequate" given the extent of the revelations of mass surveillance. "EU citizens' fundamental rights remain in danger" and "too little has been done to ensure their full protection," they say.

Concerns over surveillance laws in several EU countries

Parliament is concerned about "recent laws in some member states that extend surveillance capabilities of intelligence bodies", including in France, the UK and the Netherlands. It is also worried by revelations of mass surveillance of telecommunications and internet traffic inside the EU by the German foreign intelligence agency BND in cooperation with the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The resolution also calls for an EU strategy for greater IT independence and online privacy, stresses the need to ensure meaningful democratic oversight of intelligence activities and to rebuild trust with the US.

Procedure:  non-legislative resolution
   REF. : 20151022IPR98818  Updated: ( 30-10-2015 - 12:09

Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws

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Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.  Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.  Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.  The move follows concerns that a growing number of encryption services are now completely inaccessible apart from to the users themselves.  It came as David Cameron, the Prime Minister, pleaded with the public and MPs to back his raft of new surveillance measures.
He said terrorists, paedophiles and criminals must not be allowed a "safe space" online. 

Ministers have no plans to ban encryption services because they have an important role in the protection of legitimate online activity such as banking and personal data.
But there is concern over some aspects of so-called end-to-end encryption where only the sender and recipient of messages can decipher them.
Terrorists and criminals are increasingly using such technology to communicate beyond the reach of MI5 or the police.

On its website, Apple promotes the fact that it has, for example, "no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it's in transit between devices".
It adds: "So unlike other companies' messaging services, Apple doesn't scan your communications, and we wouldn't be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to."
Last month, Metropolitan assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the country's most senior counter-terrorism officer, warned that for some firms it was "a part of their strategy - they design their products in full recognition that they will be unable to help us because of the way they have designed them".
However, proposals to be published on Wednesday will, for the first time, place a duty on companies to be able to access their customer data in law.
A Home Office spokesman said: "The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts.
"That means ensuring that companies themselves can access the content of communications on their networks when presented with a warrant, as many of them already do for their own business purposes, for example to target advertising. These companies' reputations rest on their ability to protect their users' data."
The Investigatory Powers Bill is also expected to maintain the current responsibility for signing off requests to snoop with the Home Secretary but with extra judicial oversight – a move that is likely to anger civil liberty campaigners and some Tory backbenchers.
It will also require internet companies to retain the web browsing history of their customers for up to a year.
The bill is expected to face a tough route through parliament but Mr Cameron urged critics to back the measures.
He told ITV's This Morning: "As Prime Minister I would just say to people 'please, let's not have a situation where we give terrorists, criminals, child abductors, safe spaces to communicate'.
"It's not a safe space for them to communicate on a fixed line telephone or a mobile phone, we shouldn't allow the internet to be a safe space for them to communicate and do bad things."
Lord Carlile, the former terrorism laws watchdog, said there had been a "lot of demonization" of the police and security services over their intentions for such information.
"I think it is absurd to suggest the police and the security services have a kind of casual desire to intrude on the privacy of the innocent," he said.
"They have enough difficulty finding the guilty. No-one has produced any evidence of casual curiosity on part of the security services."

Ex-CIA director: Snowden should be 'hanged' for Paris

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A former CIA director says leaker Edward Snowden should be convicted of treason and given the death penalty in the wake of the terrorist attack on Paris.
"It's still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely electrocuted," James Woolsey told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Thursday.
Woolsey said Snowden, who divulged classified in 2013, is partly responsible for the terrorist attack in France last week that left at least 120 dead and hundreds injured."I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands," he said.
Woolsey, who served as the head of the CIA from 1993 to 1995, said the Snowden leak was "substantial."
"They turned loose not only material about some procedural aspects of something, they turned loose, for example, some substantial material about the Mexican intelligence service and law enforcement working together against human trafficking," he said.
Woolsey wondered if Snowden were "pro-pimp."
Current CIA Director John Brennan has recently echoed his predecessor's sentiments, arguing that Snowden's disclosures make it harder for intelligence officials to track terror plots.
"I think any unauthorized disclosures made by individuals that have dishonored the oath of office, that they have raised their hand and attested to, undermines this nation's security," Brennan said about Snowden at the Overseas Security Advisory Council's annual meeting on Wednesday.
Snowden fled the country after stealing classified information and disclosing the extent of U.S. surveillance programs. He currently resides in Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum.
 

http://youtu.be/rlG3Cnp6CX4

Glenn Greenwald: Why the CIA is smearing Edward Snowden after the Paris attacks    


Kako reče i aktuelni gradonačelnik Čikaga: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

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Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity.
Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden.

The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on Internet companies "building encryption without keys," which, he said, was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden's disclosures. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blamed Silicon Valley's privacy safeguards, claiming: "I have asked for help. And I haven't gotten any help."
Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Snowden "has blood on his hands" because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learned from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey thus decreed on CNN that the NSA whistleblower should be "hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely electrocuted."
   In one sense, this blame-shifting tactic is understandable. After all, the CIA, the NSA and similar agencies receive billions of dollars annually from Congress and have been vested by their Senate overseers with virtually unlimited spying power. They have one paramount mission: find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks. When they fail, of course they are desperate to blame others.
The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.
CIA officials simply made that up. It is at least equally likely that the attackers formulated their plans in face-to-face meetings. The central premise of the CIA's campaign — encryption enabled the attackers to evade our detection — is baseless.
Even if they had used encryption, what would that prove? Are we ready to endorse the precept that no human communication can ever take place without the U.S. government being able to monitor it? To prevent the CIA and FBI from "going dark" on terrorism plots that are planned in person, should we put Orwellian surveillance monitors in every room of every home that can be activated whenever someone is suspected of plotting?

The claim that the Paris attackers learned to use encryption from Snowden is even more misleading. For many years before anyone heard of Snowden, the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly advanced means of evading American surveillance.
Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate panel in March 2000 that "uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others — to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion."
Or consider a USA Today article dated Feb. 5, 2001, eight months before the 9/11 attack. The headline warned "Terror groups hide behind Web encryption." That 14-year-old article cited "officials" who claimed that "encryption has become the everyday tool of Muslim extremists."
Even the official version of how the CIA found Osama bin Laden features the claim that the Al Qaeda leader only used personal couriers to communicate, never the Internet or telephone.
Within the Snowden archive itself, one finds a 2003 document that a British spy agency called "the Jihadist Handbook." That 12-year-old document, widely published on the Internet, contains instructions for how terrorist operatives should evade U.S. electronic surveillance.
In sum, Snowden did not tell the terrorists anything they did not already know. The terrorists have known for years that the U.S. government is trying to monitor their communications.
What the Snowden disclosures actually revealed to the world was that the U.S. government is monitoring the Internet communications and activities of everyone else: hundreds of millions of innocent people under the largest program of suspicionless mass surveillance ever created, a program that multiple federal judges have ruled is illegal and unconstitutional.
That is why intelligence officials are so eager to demonize Snowden: rage that he exposed their secret, unconstitutional schemes.

But their ultimate goal is not to smear Snowden. That's just a side benefit. The real objective is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users, in order to force those companies to give the U.S. government "backdoor" access into everyone's communications. American intelligence agencies have been demanding "backdoor" access to encryption since the mid-1990s. They view exploitation of the outrage and fear resulting from the Paris attacks as their best opportunity yet to achieve this access.
The key lesson of the post-9/11 abuses — from Guantanamo to torture to the invasion of Iraq — is that we must not allow military and intelligence officials to exploit the fear of terrorism to manipulate public opinion. Rather than blindly believe their assertions, we must test those claims for accuracy. In the wake of the Paris attacks, that lesson is more urgent than ever.
Glenn Greenwald is a founding editor of the Intercept. He led the reporting for the Guardian's 2013 series on global surveillance programs, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

ко не зна ко је џејкоб апелбаум нек баци поглед на линк да сазна.
у овом десетоминутном говору је изнео низ проверљивих информација везаних за нападе у француској, глобално надгледање, изговоре тајних служби, (мени веома занимљивом и одвратном) англо-атлантском културном расизму, демократији и 'демократији' итд...погледајте говор до краја, има и пар хинтова о томе како се компјутер или телефон лако може заштитити  на мрежи (није да је нама овде то потребно ал треба знати такве ствари)


! No longer available

у духу претходног поста ево и 'каталога' опреме за надгледање и ослушкивање телефона
и чланак

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THE INTERCEPT HAS OBTAINED a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.

The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing "dirt boxes" and dozens of more obscure devices that can be mounted on vehicles, drones, and piloted aircraft. Some are designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly carried by an individual. They have names like Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus. Within the catalogue, the NSA is listed as the vendor of one device, while another was developed for use by the CIA, and another was developed for a special forces requirement. Nearly a third of the entries focus on equipment that seems to have never been described in public before.

The Intercept obtained the catalogue from a source within the intelligence community concerned about the militarization of domestic law enforcement.

A few of the devices can house a "target list" of as many as 10,000 unique phone identifiers. Most can be used to geolocate people, but the documents indicate that some have more advanced capabilities, like eavesdropping on calls and spying on SMS messages. Two systems, apparently designed for use on captured phones, are touted as having the ability to extract media files, address books, and notes, and one can retrieve deleted text messages.

Above all, the catalogue represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes. The mass shooting earlier this month in San Bernardino, California, which President Barack Obama has called "an act of terrorism," prompted calls for state and local police forces to beef up their counterterrorism capabilities, a process that has historically involved adapting military technologies to civilian use. Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and others are increasingly alarmed about how cellphone surveillance devices are used domestically and have called for a more open and informed debate about the trade-off between security and privacy — despite a virtual blackout by the federal government on any information about the specific capabilities of the gear.

"We've seen a trend in the years since 9/11 to bring sophisticated surveillance technologies that were originally designed for military use — like Stingrays or drones or biometrics — back home to the United States," said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has waged a legal battle challenging the use of cellphone surveillance devices domestically. "But using these technologies for domestic law enforcement purposes raises a host of issues that are different from a military context."

MANY OF THE DEVICES in the catalogue, including the Stingrays and dirt boxes, are cell-site simulators, which operate by mimicking the towers of major telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When someone's phone connects to the spoofed network, it transmits a unique identification code and, through the characteristics of its radio signals when they reach the receiver, information about the phone's location. There are also indications that cell-site simulators may be able to monitor calls and text messages.

In the catalogue, each device is listed with guidelines about how its use must be approved; the answer is usually via the "Ground Force Commander" or under one of two titles in the U.S. code governing military and intelligence operations, including covert action.

But domestically the devices have been used in a way that violates the constitutional rights of citizens, including the Fourth Amendment prohibition on illegal search and seizure, critics like Lynch say. They have regularly been used without warrants, or with warrants that critics call overly broad. Judges and civil liberties groups alike have complained that the devices are used without full disclosure of how they work, even within court proceedings.

"Every time police drive the streets with a Stingray, these dragnet devices can identify and locate dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders' phones," said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The controversy around cellphone surveillance illustrates the friction that comes with redeploying military combat gear into civilian life. The U.S. government has been using cell-site simulators for at least 20 years, but their use by local law enforcement is a more recent development.

The archetypical cell-site simulator, the Stingray, was trademarked by Harris Corp. in 2003 and initially used by the military, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement. Another company, Digital Receiver Technology, now owned by Boeing, developed dirt boxes — more powerful cell-site simulators — which gained favor among the NSA, CIA, and U.S. military as good tools for hunting down suspected terrorists. The devices can reportedly track more than 200 phones over a wider range than the Stingray.

Amid the war on terror, companies selling cell-site simulators to the federal government thrived. In addition to large corporations like Boeing and Harris, which clocked more than $2.6 billion in federal contracts last year, the catalogue obtained by The Intercept includes products from little-known outfits like Nevada-based Ventis, which appears to have been dissolved, and SR Technologies of Davie, Florida, which has a website that warns: "Due to the sensitive nature of this business, we require that all visitors be registered before accessing further information." (The catalogue obtained by The Intercept is not dated, but includes information about an event that occurred in 2012.)

The U.S. government eventually used cell-site simulators to target people for assassination in drone strikes, The Intercept has reported. But the CIA helped use the technology at home, too. For more than a decade, the agency worked with the U.S. Marshals Service to deploy planes with dirt boxes attached to track mobile phones across the U.S., the Wall Street Journal revealed.

After being used by federal agencies for years, cellular surveillance devices began to make their way into the arsenals of a small number of local police agencies. By 2007, Harris sought a license from the Federal Communications Commission to widely sell its devices to local law enforcement, and police flooded the FCC with letters of support. "The text of every letter was the same. The only difference was the law enforcement logo at the top," said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU, who obtained copies of the letters from the FCC through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The lobbying campaign was a success. Today nearly 60 law enforcement agencies in 23 states are known to possess a Stingray or some form of cell-site simulator, though experts believe that number likely underrepresents the real total. In some jurisdictions, police use cell-site simulators regularly. The Baltimore Police Department, for example, has used Stingrays more than 4,300 times since 2007.

Police often cite the war on terror in acquiring such systems. Michigan State Police claimed their Stingrays would "allow the State to track the physical location of a suspected terrorist," although the ACLU later found that in 128 uses of the devices last year, none were related to terrorism. In Tacoma, Washington, police claimed Stingrays could prevent attacks using improvised explosive devices — the roadside bombs that plagued soldiers in Iraq. "I am not aware of any case in which a police agency has used a cell-site simulator to find a terrorist," said Lynch. Instead, "law enforcement agencies have been using cell-site simulators to solve even the most minor domestic crimes."

The Intercept is not publishing information on devices in the catalogue where the disclosure is not relevant to the debate over the extent of domestic surveillance.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment for this article. The FBI, NSA, and U.S. military did not offer any comment after acknowledging The Intercept's written requests. The Department of Justice "uses technology in a manner that is consistent with the requirements and protections of the Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment, and applicable statutory authorities," said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesperson who, for six years prior to working for the DOJ, worked for Harris Corp., the manufacturer of the Stingray.

WHILE INTEREST FROM local cops helped fuel the spread of cell-site simulators, funding from the federal government also played a role, incentivizing municipalities to buy more of the technology. In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has expanded its funding to provide military hardware to state and local law enforcement agencies via grants awarded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. There's been a similar pattern with Stingray-like devices.

"The same grant programs that paid for local law enforcement agencies across the country to buy armored personnel carriers and drones have paid for Stingrays," said Soghoian. "Like drones, license plate readers, and biometric scanners, the Stingrays are yet another surveillance technology created by defense contractors for the military, and after years of use in war zones, it eventually trickles down to local and state agencies, paid for with DOJ and DHS money."

In 2013, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported the purchase of two HEATR long-range surveillance devices as well as $3 million worth of Stingray devices since 2008. In California, Alameda County and police departments in Oakland and Fremont are using $180,000 in Homeland Security grant money to buy Harris' Hailstorm cell-site simulator and the hand-held Thoracic surveillance device, made by Maryland security and intelligence company Keyw. As part of Project Archangel, which is described in government contract documents as a "border radio intercept program," the Drug Enforcement Administration has contracted with Digital Receiver Technology for over $1 million in DRT surveillance box equipment. The Department of the Interior contracted with Keyw for more than half a million dollars of "reduced signature cellular precision geolocation."

Information on such purchases, like so much about cell-site simulators, has trickled out through freedom of information requests and public records. The capabilities of the devices are kept under lock and key — a secrecy that hearkens back to their military origins. When state or local police purchase the cell-site simulators, they are routinely required to sign non-disclosure agreements with the FBI that they may not reveal the "existence of and the capabilities provided by" the surveillance devices, or share "any information" about the equipment with the public.

Indeed, while several of the devices in the military catalogue obtained by The Intercept are actively deployed by federal and local law enforcement agencies, according to public records, judges have struggled to obtain details of how they work. Other products in the secret catalogue have never been publicly acknowledged and any use by state, local, and federal agencies inside the U.S. is, therefore, difficult to challenge.

"It can take decades for the public to learn what our police departments are doing, by which point constitutional violations may be widespread," Wessler said. "By showing what new surveillance capabilities are coming down the pike, these documents will help lawmakers, judges, and the public know what to look out for as police departments seek ever-more powerful electronic surveillance tools."
Sometimes it's not even clear how much police are spending on Stingray-like devices because they are bought with proceeds from assets seized under federal civil forfeiture law, in drug busts and other operations. Illinois, Michigan, and Maryland police forces have all used asset forfeiture funds to pay for Stingray-type equipment.
"The full extent of the secrecy surrounding cell-site simulators is completely unjustified and unlawful," said EFF's Lynch. "No police officer or detective should be allowed to withhold information from a court or criminal defendant about how the officer conducted an investigation."

JUDGES HAVE BEEN among the foremost advocates for ending the secrecy around cell-site simulators, including by pushing back on warrant requests. At times, police have attempted to hide their use of Stingrays in criminal cases, prompting at least one judge to throw out evidence obtained by the device. In 2012, a U.S. magistrate judge in Texas rejected an application by the Drug Enforcement Administration to use a cell-site simulator in an operation, saying that the agency had failed to explain "what the government would do with" the data collected from innocent people.
Law enforcement has responded with some limited forms of transparency. In September, the Justice Department issued new guidelines for the use of Stingrays and similar devices, including that federal law enforcement agencies using them must obtain a warrant based on probable cause and must delete any data intercepted from individuals not under investigation.

Contained within the guidelines, however, is a clause stipulating vague "exceptional circumstances" under which agents could be exempt from the requirement to get a probable cause warrant.

"Cell-site simulator technology has been instrumental in aiding law enforcement in a broad array of investigations, including kidnappings, fugitive investigations, and complicated narcotics cases," said Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates.
Meanwhile, parallel guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security in October do not require warrants for operations on the U.S. border, nor do the warrant requirements apply to state and local officials who purchased their Stingrays through grants from the federal government, such as those in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Florida.
The ACLU, EFF, and several prominent members of Congress have said the federal government's exceptions are too broad and leave the door open for abuses.

"Because cell-site simulators can collect so much information from innocent people, a simple warrant for their use is not enough," said Lynch, the EFF attorney. "Police officers should be required to limit their use of the device to a short and defined period of time. Officers also need to be clear in the probable cause affidavit supporting the warrant about the device's capabilities."
In November, a federal judge in Illinois published a legal memorandum about the government's application to use a cell-tower spoofing technology in a drug-trafficking investigation. In his memo, Judge Iain Johnston sharply criticized the secrecy surrounding Stingrays and other surveillance devices, suggesting that it made weighing the constitutional implications of their use extremely difficult. "A cell-site simulator is simply too powerful of a device to be used and the information captured by it too vast to allow its use without specific authorization from a fully informed court," he wrote.

He added that Harris Corp. "is extremely protective about information regarding its device. In fact, Harris is so protective that it has been widely reported that prosecutors are negotiating plea deals far below what they could obtain so as to not disclose cell-site simulator information. ... So where is one, including a federal judge, able to learn about cell-site simulators? A judge can ask a requesting Assistant United States Attorney or a federal agent, but they are tight-lipped about the device, too."

The ACLU and EFF believe that the public has a right to review the types of devices being used to encourage an informed debate on the potentially far-reaching implications of the technology. The catalogue obtained by The Intercept, said Wessler, "fills an important gap in our knowledge, but it is incumbent on law enforcement agencies to proactively disclose information about what surveillance equipment they use and what steps they take to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights."

бтњ, овај интерсепт је веома занимљив сајт

InterApp: The Gadget That Can Spy on Any Smartphone

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Tel Aviv-based Rayzone Group is selling a nifty little gadget called InterApp that can leverage outdated mobile devices and intercept and extract information from nearby smartphones.
As Razyone describes its product, "InterApp is a game-changing tactical intelligence system, developed for intelligence and law enforcement agencies, enabling them to stealthily collect information from the cloud using smartphone application vulnerabilities."
InterApp can allow its operators to break into nearby smartphones that have their WiFi connection open, and then, employing a diverse arsenal of security vulnerabilities, gain root permission on devices and exfiltrate information to a tactical server.
InterApp can steal passwords and data from targeted smartphones According to Rayzone, InterApp can steal a user's email address password and content, passwords for social networking apps, Dropbox passwords and files, the user's phone contact list, and his photo gallery.
Additionally, the gadget can also acquire the phone's previous geographical locations and plot them on a map, IMEI details, MSISDN data, MAC address, device model, OS info, and personal information on the target, such as gender, age, address, education, and more.
InterApp works on a variety of platforms, operates very fast, handles hundreds of devices at the same time, and requires no technical skills to operate, coming equipped with an idiot-proof administration panel.
InterApp leaves no tracks behind Even better, InterApp's hacking operations leave no forensics traces on a target's smartphone, or so Rayzone claims.
The company claims that its device was intentionally created for law enforcement, recommending its usage in tactical police centers, airports, or with intervention teams, being quite small and portable.
Rayzone's other products include TA9 - a big data analysis platform; Piranha - a 2G, 3G, and 4G IMSI catcher; ArrowCell - a device for detecting, locating, and neutralizing other IMSI catchers; and GeoMatrix - an advanced geo-location intelligence system. Basically, the company is the hardware-side counterpart of the infamous Hacking Team, an offensive-security vendor from Italy.

Quote from: дејан on 18-12-2015, 12:11:09


бтњ, овај интерсепт је веома занимљив сајт

Da, pa nije Grinvold blesav.


Evo:

Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key

Većini Američkih građana nadziranje komunikacije bez sudskog naloga je u principu okej.


AP-NORC Poll: Online surveillance is OK for most

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         WASHINGTON (AP) -- A majority of Americans say they support warrantless government surveillance of the Internet communications of U.S. citizens, according to a new poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

It's at least somewhat important for the government to sacrifice freedoms to ensure safety, most say in the survey.

Here are some things to know about public opinion on civil liberties from the AP-NORC poll:

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MOST SUPPORT WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

According to the new poll, 56 percent of Americans favor and 28 percent oppose the ability of the government to conduct surveillance on Internet communications without needing to get a warrant. That includes such surveillance on U.S. citizens.

Majorities both of Republicans (67 percent) and Democrats (55 percent) favor government surveillance of Americans' Internet activities to watch for suspicious activity that might be connected to terrorism. Independents are more divided, with 40 percent in favor and 35 percent opposed. Only a third of Americans under 30, but nearly two-thirds 30 and older, support warrantless surveillance.

The poll finds that for most Americans, safety concerns trump civil liberties at least some of the time.

More than half - 54 percent - say it's sometimes necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism, while 45 percent think that's not necessary. On a more general level, 42 percent say it's more important for the government to ensure Americans' safety than to protect citizens' rights, while 27 percent think rights are more important and 31 percent rate both equally.

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TERRORISM CONCERNS RISING

Concerns about terrorism have risen since 2013. In the latest poll, nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned that they or their family might be victims of a terrorist attack, after just 3 in 10 said so two years ago.

Six in 10 Americans now think that the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, indicate an increased risk of attacks against Western countries, while 37 percent think the risk is about the same as it was before. Three-quarters of Republicans and majorities of both Democrats and independents think the attacks are an indication of increased risk.

Americans are similarly concerned about both domestic terrorism and possible attacks by Islamic extremist groups, with about 6 in 10 saying they're at least somewhat concerned about each.

Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to say they're concerned about domestic terrorism, but Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say they're concerned about attacks by Islamic extremists, 67 percent to 47 percent.

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MIXED OPINIONS ON PROTECTING RIGHTS

Americans have mixed views of how the government is doing at protecting their rights.

Seven in 10 say the government does at least a somewhat good job protecting the right to vote, and nearly 6 in 10 say it's doing a good job of protecting freedom of speech and of the press. More than half say it's doing a good job of protecting religious liberties.

But just 4 in 10 Americans rate the government's performance as good on protecting the right to equal protection under the law, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, or the right to bear arms.

Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say the government is doing a good job of protecting the right to freedom of religion, 64 percent to 49 percent.

On protecting the right to bear arms, 46 percent of Democrats and just 33 percent of Republicans think the government is doing a good job.

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DIVIDE ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTIES

Majorities of Americans think it's important to protect religious freedoms for a variety of religious groups, including Christians, Muslims and Jews.

But they're significantly more likely to say so of some groups than others. While 82 percent of Americans in the poll say that it's extremely or very important that Christians be allowed to freely practice their religion in the United States, just 61 percent say the same for Muslims. Seventy-two percent say religious freedom is important for Jews, and 67 percent say the same of Mormons. And 63 percent say it's important to protect the freedoms of people with no religion.

Among Republicans, 88 percent say it's important that Christians be able to worship freely and 60 percent say so of Muslims. Among Democrats, too, there's a gap, with 83 percent saying religious liberties are important for Christians and 67 percent saying so for Muslims.

Eight in 10 Americans say it's very or extremely important for people like themselves to be allowed to practice their religion freely.

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The AP-NORC Poll of 1,042 adults was conducted online and by phone Dec. 10-13 using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online. People selected for AmeriSpeak who didn't otherwise have access to the Internet were interviewed over the phone.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 05-03-2015, 10:08:10
Snowden kopa da se vrati u Ameriku, ako će da mu garantuju pošteno suđenje.

Skoro punu godinu dana kasnije... Snowden i dalje veli isto...

Snowden would return to US if government guarantees fair trial

QuoteEdward Snowden said if the government would guarantee him a fair trial, he would return to the United States.

Snowden spoke via Skype from Russia on Saturday at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, WTOP reported.

"I've told the government I would return if they would guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public interest defense of why this was done and allow a jury to decide," Snowden said.
Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, copied and leaked classified information from the NSA about global surveillance programs. Snowden then fled the country. He could face up to 30 years in prison, WTOP reported.
Snowden had talked about making a plea deal with the government in the past.
On Saturday, Snowden said some of his former colleagues at the NSA and CIA said "the Constitution doesn't really matter." Though others agreed with him about the importance of an individual's privacy.

 China Tries Its Hand at Pre-Crime 

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China's effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country's largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur. "It's very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror," Wu Manqing, the chief engineer for the military contractor, told reporters at a conference in December. "But what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities."
The program is unprecedented because there are no safeguards from privacy protection laws and minimal pushback from civil liberty advocates and companies, says Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has advised Google on freedom of expression and the Internet. The project also takes advantage of an existing vast network of neighborhood informants assigned by the Communist Party to monitor everything from family planning violations to unorthodox behavior. A draft cybersecurity law unveiled in July grants the government almost unbridled access to user data in the name of national security. "If neither legal restrictions nor unfettered political debate about Big Brother surveillance is a factor for a regime, then there are many different sorts of data that could be collated and cross-referenced to help identify possible terrorists or subversives," says Paul Pillar, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Building a crystal ball to predict and prevent terror attacks, a real-world version of Minority Report, is the ultimate goal of crime fighters the world over. But, so far, more data has just meant more noise, security experts say. "There are not enough examples of terrorist activity to model what it looks like in data, and that's true no matter how much data you have," says Jim Harper, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. "You need yeast to make bread. You can't make up for a lack of yeast by adding more flour.""We don't call it a big data platform but a united information environment." —Wu Manqing, China Electronics TechnologyChina was a surveillance state long before Edward Snowden clued Americans in to the extent of domestic spying. Since the Mao era, the government has kept a secret file, called a dang'an, on almost everyone. Dang'an contain school reports, health records, work permits, personality assessments, and other information that might be considered confidential and private in other countries. The contents of the dang'an can determine whether a citizen is eligible for a promotion or can secure a coveted urban residency permit. The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness.
New antiterror laws that went into effect on Jan. 1 allow authorities to gain access to bank accounts, telecommunications, and a national network of surveillance cameras called Skynet. Companies including Baidu, China's leading search engine; Tencent, operator of the popular social messaging app WeChat; and Sina, which controls the Weibo microblogging site, already cooperate with official requests for information, according to a report from the U.S. Congressional Research Service. A Baidu spokesman says the company wasn't involved in the new antiterror initiative. Tencent and Sina's Weibo didn't respond to requests for comment.
China Electronics Technology, which got the antiterrorism job in October 2014, had operating revenue of 164 billion yuan ($25 billion) in 2015. Apart from supplying the Chinese military with radar and electronic warfare systems, the company has played a leading role in the country's ambitious space program.
Much of the project is shrouded in secrecy. The Ministry of State Security, which oversees counterintelligence and political security, doesn't even have its own website, let alone answer phone calls. Only Wu, the engineer at China Electronics Technology, would speak on the record. He hinted at the scope of the data collection effort when he said the software would be able to draw portraits of suspects by cross-referencing information from bank accounts, jobs, hobbies, consumption patterns, and footage from surveillance cameras.
The program would flag unusual behavior, such as a resident of a poor village who suddenly has a lot of money in her bank account or someone with no overseas relatives who makes frequent calls to foreigners. According to Wu, these could be indicators that a person is a terrorist. "We don't call it a big data platform," he said, "but a united information environment." In China, once a suspect is targeted, police can freeze bank accounts and compel companies to hand over records of his communications.
Another China Electronics Technology executive, who requested anonymity because he isn't authorized to speak publicly, says the antiterrorism software would first be tested in territories where Chinese authorities are struggling to stamp out sometimes violent opposition to Communist rule by ethnic minorities. He says the pilot had a better chance of success than a nationwide program, because it's focused on the 22 million residents of the sparsely populated Xinjiang territory in China's northwest and the 3 million in mountainous Tibet.
Brookings's Pillar is skeptical. "No system of surveillance and exploitation of intelligence can stop everything," he says. But Tsui, the Hong Kong professor, says if anyone has a chance of coming up with a workable high-tech Big Brother, it's the Chinese. The lack of privacy protections means that China's data sniffers are more practiced than those in the West. "The people who are good at this are good because they have access to a lot of data," he says. "They can experiment with all kinds of stuff."
The bottom line: A top Chinese military contractor is building a data analytics platform to help authorities identify terrorists before they strike. 

No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting to Being Tracked by Police

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The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment.
The trial court had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray — the first time any court in the nation had done so.
Last April, a Baltimore police detective testified that the department has used Stingrays 4,300 times since 2007, usually without notifying judges or defendants.
The ruling has the potential to set a strong precedent about warrantless location tracking. "Police should now be on notice," said Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "Accurately explain your surveillance activities to a judge and get a warrant, or risk your evidence being thrown out."
Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking nearby phones into connecting and revealing users' locations. Stingrays sweep up data on every phone nearby — collecting information on dozens or potentially hundreds of people.
The case centers around the 2014 arrest of Kerron Andrews, a suspect in a shooting that injured three people. In order to locate him, police filed a "pen register" application, which is not a warrant, and does not require them to establish probable cause. A judge granted the application, which said that police would obtain the information from Andrews' wireless service provider.
Instead, police used a high-tech Stingray called the "Hailstorm." They located Andrews and found the murder weapon. However, they repeatedly failed to notify the judge about the change in tactics. Finally, during a hearing last June, the police department was forced to testify about the Hailstorm, leading the judge to accuse it of intentionally withholding information from the defense.
After the trial court threw out the Stingray evidence, the Maryland attorney general alarmed civil liberties groups by arguing that anyone who keeps their phone turned "on" is consenting to being tracked by police. The full ruling, which has not yet been issued, will presumably reject that argument.
During the oral argument before the appeals court in February, one of the judges called the police's pen register application a "completely false document," and "completely disingenuous."
The Department of Justice issued guidelines in September requiring federal officers to apply for a warrant before using a Stingray. Those guidelines only applied to the seven agencies known to use them, not to state and local police. In 2014, the state of Maryland passed a law requiring a warrant for police to track an individual's current or real-time location. The law only affects cases going forward, so it did not influence Andrew's case.
Stingrays are also piquing the interest of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers held a hearing Tuesday on a bill that would require all police departments to get a warrant before using Stingrays. "Just because it's easier in 2016 for law enforcement to track our location and learn intimate details about our lives, it doesn't mean those details are somehow less worthy of Constitutional protection," said House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. "Get a warrant."
In December, The Intercept published a secret catalogue of U.S. government surveillance equipment, including Stingrays. The advertisements for some items boast that they can spy on 10,000 people.

Government Can't Let Smartphones Be `Black Boxes,' Obama Says

QuotePresident Barack Obama said Friday that smartphones -- like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple Inc. to help it hack -- can't be allowed to be "black boxes," inaccessible to the government. The technology industry, he said, should work with the government instead of leaving the issue to Congress.
"You cannot take an absolutist view on this," Obama said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. "If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it's fetishizing our phones above every other value."
Obama's appearance on Friday at the event known as SXSW, the first by a sitting president, comes as the FBI tries to force Apple Inc. to help investigators access an iPhone used by one of the assailants in December's deadly San Bernardino, California, terror attack. Apple has appealed a magistrate court order that it assist the government, saying to do so would undermine its encryption technology.
Rapid technological advancements "offer us enormous opportunities, but also are very disruptive and unsettling," Obama said at the festival, where he hoped to persuade tech workers to enter public service. "They empower individuals to do things that they could have never dreamed of before, but they also empower folks who are very dangerous to spread dangerous messages."
Siding with Apple are technology companies including Amazon Inc., Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Google's parent Alphabet Inc. On Thursday, the government filed a memorandum in the case arguing that Apple would need to assign as few as six workers for as little as two weeks to hack into Syed Farook's phone.
"This burden, which is not unreasonable, is the direct result of Apple's deliberate marketing decision to engineer its products so that the government cannot search them, even with a warrant," government attorneys said in the filing.'Sloppy and Rushed'Obama was interviewed at the festival by the CEO and editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, Evan Smith, who told him that "it looks to the tech community, or to some in the tech community, that government is the enemy" in its dealings with Apple. South by Southwest, now 30 years old, has grown from an event to highlight local musicians and artists into one of the nation's largest and most popular technology conferences and film-and-music festivals.
The White House has backed the FBI in its fight with Apple, but has said Obama believes it it is vital to balance privacy protections against the needs of law enforcement. Obama has not weighed in on legislation being drafted by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and the senior Democrat on the panel, Dianne Feinstein of California, which would require companies to comply with court orders asking for assistance accessing encrypted data.
He indicated on Friday that he believes leaving the matter to lawmakers may not be ideal. The result would be "sloppy and rushed and it will go through Congress in ways that have not been thought through," he said.
Apple and other tech firms have said that building backdoors into their encrypted products could put them at a disadvantage to foreign competitors. They have also warned that China or other countries could demand similar cooperation with government investigations.
Without commenting on the Apple case, Obama dismissed those arguments, saying that for centuries law enforcement agencies have been able to search private property for evidence of crimes using a warrant.
"The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket."
Compromise is possible, he said, and the technology industry must help design it.
"I suspect the answer is going to come down to, how do we create a system that, encryption is as strong as possible, the key is secure as possible, and it is accessible by the smallest number of people possible for the subset of issues that we agree is important," he said.Recruiting CodersIt isn't the first time his policies have caused the White House a headache at the Austin festival. In 2014, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave a virtual keynote speech from Russia on privacy rights. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange also spoke remotely to the conference that year.
Snowden's leaks have complicated the encryption issue, Obama said, by "elevating people's suspicions" of government surveillance.
Still, White House officials believe that engagement with the technology sector is critical, especially if the administration is to recruit talented programmers to help modernize the federal government.
"Cooperation that exists between the government and the tech sector continues beyond the issue of encryption," Jason Goldman, the White House's chief digital officer, said on a conference call with reporters before Obama's appearance.
In recent years, Obama has hired officials from companies including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Twitter Inc. to help repair the broken HealthCare.gov enrollment system and the byzantine Veterans Affairs claims processing system, among other assignments. The administration hopes the president's appearance at SXSW can help replenish the ranks of hundreds of technology specialists who put their Silicon Valley careers on hold for public service.
Obama called HealthCare.gov "an example of the big and the bloated and frustrating" in government. When the website failed in October 2013, he said, it "was a little embarrassing for me because I was the cool early adopter president. My entire campaign had been premised on having really cool technology and social media and all that."
After fixing HealthCare.gov with the assistance of private-sector technology experts, "what we realized was we could potentially build a SWAT team, a world class tech office inside of the government, that was helping across agencies," Obama said. That became the U.S. Digital Service.

Ovo ne znam ni u koji topik da stavim pa hajde onda ovde. Dakle, Amazon radi na tome da čin logovanja učini... glupljim... to je jedina reč koja mi pada na pamet, pošto hoće da korišćenje lozinki za autentikaciju korisnika zamene selfijem ili nekim gestom koji ćete napraviti pred kamerom. Zvuči startrekovski, naravno, trebalo bi da se obradujemo ali teško je ne zamisliti kako jednosekundni čin ukucavanja pasvorda postaje naporan, iznurujući pregovarački proces dok pratite uputstva nekog jebenog Amazonovog securebota koji od vas traži da namigujete ili se smešite u kameru koja nema dovoljno osvetljenja ili već nešto... Naravno, kao i uvek, u pozadini zamenjivanja nečeg što radi nečim što ne radi stoji to da se sada većina ljudi na internet penje telefonom...


Amazon wants to replace passwords with selfies and videos

QuoteAmazon has filed a patent application for a technology which would allow consumers to authenticate transactions via selfie or video. As part of the verification process, the computer or mobile device will prompt the user to 'perform certain actions, motions or gestures, such as to smile, blink, or tilt his or her head.'
Amazon claims that the introduction of facial recognition technology (FRT) will make transactions more user friendly and secure than conventional identification methods, such as passwords which can be stolen and hacked.
The e-commerce giant added that the new technology would remove the hassle of entering in passwords on tiny mobile device screens.


'The entry of these passwords on portable devices is not user friendly in many cases, as the small touchscreen or keyboard elements can be difficult to accurately select, and can require the user to turn away from friends or co-workers when entering a password, which can be awkward or embarrassing in many situations,' read the patent application.
Amazon is not the first company to show interest in FR software for authentication. At CeBIT last year, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma demonstrated Alipay's recognition technologies – using a selfie as payment ID. He argued that buying things online is 'always a big headache' for consumers – "You forget your password, you worry about your security. Today we show you a new technology."
This month Google also revealed that it was running a trial in San Francisco which allows smartphone users on Android and iOS to pay for products via FR, without even having to remove their mobiles from their pockets. Pali Bhat, senior director of product management at Google, explained: 'This process uses an in-store camera to automatically confirm your identity based on your Hands Free profile picture.'
Earlier this year, MasterCard too announced its plans to invest in FRT in the UK, in an effort to reduce false decline transactions and increase security for mobile payments. In the roll-out users will be able to choose between finger scanning and FR for verification, instead of traditional passwords and PIN codes.

Your Data Footprint Is Affecting Your Life In Ways You Can't Even Imagine

Quotemagine you're moving apartments and shopping for new furniture at a couple of stores. You see a couch you like, but you're not sure, so you leave thinking maybe you'll return another day. But that couch doesn't take well to rejection. It gets up, leaves the store, and starts following you around as you shop elsewhere and even after you go home having purchased a different couch. Then you start getting offers in the mail for new mattresses.This is basically people's experience on the Internet today—where innocently clicking on a link results in ad targeting that's hard to shake and our purchases quickly reveal more information than we intend, such as the infamous example of Target knowing a woman is pregnant before she's told her family—and before she's purchased any baby products.
From the credit card offers we receive to recommendations we see on Netflix and posts we see on Facebook, ads and marketing are the obvious example of our personal data being aggregated and analyzed to make predictions about us. National security—facilitated by massive and sometimes illegal data collection by the government—is clearly another. And if you work at a large information-based business, you've no doubt heard the terms "big data" and "bottom line" in the same sentence before.Predictions about you are deeply shaping your life in ways of which you are probably blissfully unaware. But these (mostly) benign examples that we encounter every day hide the truth about what large-scale government and corporate data collection means and where it's being used. Predictions about you (and millions of other strangers) are starting to deeply shape your life. Your career, your love life, major decisions about your health and well-being, and even if you end up in jail, are now being governed in no small part by the digital bread crumbs you've left behind—many of which you don't even know you've dropped in the first place.Cities have long seen the potential in big data to improve the government and the lives of citizens, and this is now being put into action in ways where governments touch citizens' lives in very sensitive areas. New York City's Department of Homelessness Services is mining apartment eviction filings, to see if they can understand who is at risk of becoming homeless and intervene early. And police departments all over the country have adopted predictive policing software that guides where officers should deploy, and at what time, leading to reduced crime in some cities.Predictions based on this biased data could create a feedback loop.In one study in Los Angeles, police officers deployed to certain neighborhoods by predictive policing software prevented 4.3 crimes per week, compared to 2 crimes per week when assigned to patrol a specific area by human crime analysts. Surely, a reduction in crime is a good thing. But community activists in places such as Bellingham, Washington, have grave doubts. They worry that outsiders can't examine how the algorithms work, since the software is usually proprietary, and so citizens have no way of knowing what data the government is using to target them. They also worry that predictive policing is just exacerbating existing patterns of racial profiling. If the underlying crime data being used is the result of years of over-policing minority communities for minor offenses, then the predictions based on this biased data could create a feedback loop and lead to yet more over-policing.
At a smaller and more limited scale is the even more sensitive area of child protection services. Though the data isn't really as "big" as in other examples, a few agencies are carefully exploring using statistical models to make decisions in several areas, such as which children in the system are most in danger of violence, which children are most in need of a trauma screening, and which are at risk of entering the criminal justice system.
In Hillsborough County, Florida, where a series of child homicides occurred, a private provider selected to manage the county's child welfare system in 2012 came in and analyzed the data. Cases with the highest probability of serious injury or death had a  few factors in common, they found: a child under the age of three, a "paramour" in the home, a substance abuse or domestic violence history, and a parent previously in the foster care system. They identified nine practices to use in these cases and hired a software provider to create a dashboard that allowed real-time feedback and dashboards. Their success has led to the program being implemented statewide.Dating apps get popular when they are actually connecting people, so it's obvious that their systems usually try to show you matches based on some formula that accounts for the person you say you prefer, what your swipes and clicks reveal, and how others behave. Apps surely increase the number of strangers you can meet, but in the quest for love, research shows that all the work of their matching algorithms are mostly meaningless. You still need to work hard to find the right person, because a formula can't account for all the uncertainty and individuality about what finding a lasting relationship requires.
But while they don't have the magic formula for creating love, dating sites are still shaping the romantic lives of the growing portion of the population that use them. Consider that Tinder has an internal rating of how desirable you are. If you're getting a lot of swipes, you won't be shown as frequently to give other people a chance. Another app, Coffee Meets Bagel, guides users to people of their own race or ethnicity, even if they say "no preference" on their profile. Partly, they do this because of what their data reveal: even when users say they have no preference, in private, people gravitate to others like them. That may be true in general, but for any given user, it may nudge them to live more segregated lives than they would otherwise want to, without them knowing at all.The emerging and heavily funded field of precision medicine revolves around the fact that doctors can start to personalize diagnosis and treatment based on how others—whether similar to you in their DNA, demographics, disease pattern, or life habits—respond to care. In the future, the goal is that health care will be highly personalized, and improved outcomes and lower costs will result. This is at an early stage, but already, responding to financial incentives in Obamacare, hospitals are using data mining to predict which patients are more likely to be readmitted within 90 days. People at a high risk to return are likely to receive more attentive follow-up care. At one hospital, for example, they are assigned a post discharge coordinator, where someone at a lower risk might not get the same treatment."It's not that much of a stretch, where [a computer] actually says, here's what I suggest with your portfolio."Personal finance is another new area for algorithmic, data-driven predictions, with a number of new "robo-advsior" apps. "We're getting used to computers actually being pretty credible in terms of the recommendations they make," says Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and its Center for Data Science. "It's not that much of a stretch, where [a computer] actually says, here's what I suggest with your portfolio."
Even major life decisions like college admissions and hiring are being affected. You might think that a college is considering you on your merits, and while that's mostly true, it's not entirely.  Pressured to improve their rankings, colleges are very interested in increasing their graduation rates and the percentage of admitted students who enroll. They have now have developed statistical programs to pick students who will do well on these measures. These programs may take into account obvious factors like grades, but also surprising factors like their sex, race, and behavior on social media accounts. If your demographic factors or social media presence happen to doom you, you may find it harder to get into school—and not know why.
And what about getting a job? Consider a startup called Gild, which has built a database of tens of millions of professionals that contains data purchased from third-party providers plus "anything and everything that's publicly available," according to CEO Sheeroy Desai. Its system identifies candidates who fit a job opening and analyzes factors that might predict their success. The company says it currently has about 10,000 recruiting and hiring managers using the platform, from employers such as Facebook, HBO, and TD Bank.
Desai says Gild's speciality is "unifying information across very different sources." Its big data-based recommendations consider factors including job history, language, and behavior on social media sites, and public work samples such as a programmer's open-source code contributions. By analyzing the job movements of millions of people, it rates candidates not only based on their expertise but also how in-demand they might be based on the current job market. It also tries to answer questions like when a given person is most susceptible to a new job offer, how a person's career track predicts where they'll be in 10 years, and the likelihood a person will be a good fit at a company.The reason the job market is so inefficient is that we have humans making decisions."The reason the job market is so inefficient is that we have humans making decisions," says Desai. Humans, he says, often have more nuanced judgment than a computer, but that judgment is clouded by lots of little biases that people are blind to. "At the end of the day, companies are still going to make decisions based on humans. We want to make more unbiased recommendations on who you should be interviewing."
On the plus side, recruiters have lauded it for helping them find candidates they might not otherwise have considered, like someone who didn't go to college. A downside? Candidates trying to negotiate a higher salary against this kind of smart system might find a harder time of it. In either case, job candidates, Desai says, are sometimes shocked at how much interviewers know about them ahead of time."I think the opportunity is a rich one. At the same time, the ethical considerations need to be guiding us," says Jesse Russell, chief program officer at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, who has followed the use of predictive analytics in child protective services. Officials, he says, are treading carefully before using data to make decisions about individuals, especially when the consequences of being wrong—such as taking a child out of his or her home unnecessarily—are huge. And while caseworker decision-making can be flawed or biased, so can the programs that humans design. When you rely too much on data—if the data is flawed or incomplete, as could be the case in predictive policing—you risk further validating bad decisions or existing biases.There's this danger we lose our identity as people and we become categories.Russell's concerns are applicable to many areas where big data touches our lives. What happens when a computer says you're likely to commit a crime before you do it, and, worse, what if the data underlying that prediction is wrong and you can't do anything about it? What happens when a dating program is slowly pushing us to a more segregated society because it shows us the people it thinks we want to see? Or when personalized medicine can save lives, but because it is based mainly around genomes sequenced from white people of European descent, it's only saving some lives?
And while it's true that analytics can already make smarter guesses than humans in many situations, people are more than their data. A world where people struggle to rise above what is expected of them—say a college won't admit them because they don't seem like someone with a good chance of graduating—is a sad world. "There's this danger we lose our identity as people and we become categories," says Dhar.On the other hand, big data does have the potential to vastly expand our understanding of who we are and why we do what we do. A decade ago, serious scientists would have laughed someone out of the room who proposed a study of "the human condition." It is a topic so broad and lacking in measurability. But perhaps the most important manifestation of big data in people's lives could come from the ability for scientists to study huge, unwieldy questions they couldn't before.
A massive scientific undertaking to study the human condition is set to launch in January of 2017. The Kavli Human Project, funded by the Kavli Foundation, plans to recruit 10,000 New Yorkers from all walks of life to be measured for 10 years. And by measured, they mean everything: all financial transactions, tax returns, GPS coordinates, genomes, chemical exposure, IQ, bluetooth sensors around the house, who subjects text and call—and that's just the beginning. In all, the large team of academics expect to collect about a billion data points per person per year at an unprecedented low cost for each data point compared to other large research surveys."There's so many pressing problems that we struggle with in this society, and we are so bad at data-driven policy."The hope is with so much continuous data, researchers can for the first time start to disentangle the complex, seemingly unanswerable questions that have plagued our society, from what is causing the obesity epidemic to how to disrupt the poverty to prison cycle. "There's so many pressing problems that we struggle with in this society, and we are so bad at data-driven policy," says Paul Glimcher, director of the project and a professor of neural science, economics, and psychology at NYU.
For example, how do people decide what to eat? In these decisions, there's complex interactions between biology, behavior, and environment that have always made this question hard to study comprehensively. But if the Kavli Human Project combines geo-located food shopping and consumption data with health biomarkers with financial details and other data, obesity experts say this will be a "first-of-its-kind bio-behavioral, economic, and cultural atlas of diet quality and health for New York City" that can help them make breakthroughs.
Part of its potential is that it could bring the benefits of big data to those who are currently left out. "I think it's really not been the case that [big data] has broadly impacted everyone. I think it's impacted the people who write for The New York Times and Fast Company, and people who read The New York Times and Fast Company," Glimcher says.
Glimcher says he's disappointed at the ways that big data tools have been used so far. "It's just terrible," he says. "Sometimes big data is treated as if it's an organism. And the question is how will this organism interact with us. And we really honestly hate that. We like the idea as scientists, as activists—we are big data. We are designing big data. And the challenge is to design big data that has those positive impacts, not to wait and see." 

Brus šajner:



The Internet of Things Will Be the World's Biggest Robot

QuoteThe Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with each other.
These "things" will have two separate parts. One part will be sensors that collect data about us and our environment. Already our smartphones know our location and, with their onboard accelerometers, track our movements. Things like our thermostats and light bulbs will know who is in the room. Internet-enabled street and highway sensors will know how many people are out and about­ -- and eventually who they are. Sensors will collect environmental data from all over the world.
The other part will be actuators. They'll affect our environment. Our smart thermostats aren't collecting information about ambient temperature and who's in the room for nothing; they set the temperature accordingly. Phones already know our location, and send that information back to Google Maps and Waze to determine where traffic congestion is; when they're linked to driverless cars, they'll automatically route us around that congestion. Amazon already wants autonomous drones to deliver packages. The Internet of Things will increasingly perform actions for us and in our name.
Increasingly, human intervention will be unnecessary. The sensors will collect data. The system's smarts will interpret the data and figure out what to do. And the actuators will do things in our world. You can think of the sensors as the eyes and ears of the Internet, the actuators as the hands and feet of the Internet, and the stuff in the middle as the brain. This makes the future clearer. The Internet now senses, thinks, and acts.
We're building a world-sized robot, and we don't even realize it.
I've started calling this robot the World-Sized Web.
The World-Sized Web -- can I call it WSW? -- is more than just the Internet of Things. Much of the WSW's brains will be in the cloud, on servers connected via cellular, Wi-Fi, or short-range data networks. It's mobile, of course, because many of these things will move around with us, like our smartphones. And it's persistent. You might be able to turn off small pieces of it here and there, but in the main the WSW will always be on, and always be there.
None of these technologies are new, but they're all becoming more prevalent. I believe that we're at the brink of a phase change around information and networks. The difference in degree will become a difference in kind. That's the robot that is the WSW.
This robot will increasingly be autonomous, at first simply and increasingly using the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Drones with sensors will fly to places that the WSW needs to collect data. Vehicles with actuators will drive to places that the WSW needs to affect. Other parts of the robots will "decide" where to go, what data to collect, and what to do.
We're already seeing this kind of thing in warfare; drones are surveilling the battlefield and firing weapons at targets. Humans are still in the loop, but how long will that last? And when both the data collection and resultant actions are more benign than a missile strike, autonomy will be an easier sell.
By and large, the WSW will be a benign robot. It will collect data and do things in our interests; that's why we're building it. But it will change our society in ways we can't predict, some of them good and some of them bad. It will maximize profits for the people who control the components. It will enable totalitarian governments. It will empower criminals and hackers in new and different ways. It will cause power balances to shift and societies to change.
These changes are inherently unpredictable, because they're based on the emergent properties of these new technologies interacting with each other, us, and the world. In general, it's easy to predict technological changes due to scientific advances, but much harder to predict social changes due to those technological changes. For example, it was easy to predict that better engines would mean that cars could go faster. It was much harder to predict that the result would be a demographic shift into suburbs. Driverless cars and smart roads will again transform our cities in new ways, as will autonomous drones, cheap and ubiquitous environmental sensors, and a network that can anticipate our needs.
Maybe the WSW is more like an organism. It won't have a single mind. Parts of it will be controlled by large corporations and governments. Small parts of it will be controlled by us. But writ large its behavior will be unpredictable, the result of millions of tiny goals and billions of interactions between parts of itself.
We need to start thinking seriously about our new world-spanning robot. The market will not sort this out all by itself. By nature, it is short-term and profit-motivated­ -- and these issues require broader thinking. University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo has proposed a Federal Robotics Commission as a place where robotics expertise and advice can be centralized within the government. Japan and Korea are already moving in this direction.
Speaking as someone with a healthy skepticism for  another government agency, I think we need to go further. We need to create agency, a Department of Technology Policy, that can deal with the WSW in all its complexities. It needs the power to aggregate expertise and advice other agencies, and probably the authority to regulate when appropriate. We can argue the details, but there is no existing government entity that has the either the expertise or authority to tackle something this broad and far reaching. And the question is not about whether government will start regulating these technologies, it's about how smart they'll be when they do it.
The WSW is being built right now, without anyone noticing, and it'll be here before we know it. Whatever changes it means for society, we don't want it to take us by surprise.
This essay originally appeared on Forbes.com, which annoyingly blocks browsers using ad blockers.
EDITED TO ADD: Kevin Kelly has also thought along these lines, calling the robot "Holos."
EDITED TO ADD: Commentary.

Recimo da ovo zgodno ide na ovaj topik:



Why we should fear a cashless world

QuoteThe health food chain Tossed has just opened the UK's first cashless cafe. It's another step towards the death of cash.
This is nothing new. Money is tech. The casting of coins made shells, whales' teeth and other such primitive forms of money redundant. The printing press did the same for precious metals: we started using paper notes instead. Electronic banking put paid to the cheque. Contactless payment is now doing the same to cash, which is becoming less and less convenient. In the marketplace convenience usually wins.
That's fine as long as people are making this choice freely. What concerns me is the unofficial war on cash that is going on, from the suspicion with which you are treated if you ever use large sums of cash to the campaign in Europe to decommission the €500 note. I'm not sure the consequences have been properly considered. We already live in a world that is, as far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, about as unequal as it gets. It may even be as unequal as it's ever been. My worry is that a cashless society may exacerbate inequality even further.
It will hand yet more power to the financial sector in that banks and related fintech companies will oversee all transactions. The crash of 2008 showed that, when push comes to shove, banks have already been exempted from the very effective regulation that is bankruptcy – one by which the rest of us must all operate. Do we want this sector to have yet more power and influence?
In a world without cash, every payment you make will be traceable. Do you want governments (which are not always benevolent), banks or payment processors to have potential access to that information? The power this would hand them is enormous and the potential scope for Orwellian levels of surveillance is terrifying.
Cash, on the other hand, empowers its users. It enables them to buy and sell, and store their wealth, without being dependent on anyone else. They can stay outside the financial system, if so desired.
There are many reasons, both moral and practical, to want this. In 2008 many rushed to take their money out of the banks. If the financial system really was as close to breaking point as we are told it was, then such actions are quite justified. When Cyprus's banks teetered on the cliff of financial disaster in 2011, we saw bail-ins. Ordinary people's money in deposit accounts was sequestered to bail out the system. If your life savings were threatened with confiscation to bail out a corporation you considered profligate, I imagine you too would rush to withdraw them.


We have seen similar panics in Greece and, to a lesser extent, across southern Europe. Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, recently declared that banking was not fixed and that we would see financial panic again. In Japan, the central bank has imposed negative rates and you are charged by banks to store money. This is to try and goad people into spending, rather than saving. So much cash has been withdrawn from banks that there are now reports that the country has sold out of safes.
These are all quite legitimate reasons to want to exit the system. I'm not saying we should all take our money out of the bank, but that we should all have the option to. Cash gives you that option. Why remove it? It's our money. Not the banks'.
The telephone teaches us a useful lesson. At its peak in 2008, there were 1.3bn landlines for a global population close to 7 billion. Today more than 6 billion people have a mobile phone – more than have access to a toilet, according to a UN study. Many assume that the mobile succeeded where the landline failed, because the superior technology made widespread coverage more possible. There is something to that.
But the main reason, simply, is that, to get a landline, you need a bank account and credit. About half of the world's population is "unbanked", without access to the basic financial services you need. Telecoms companies saw no potential custom, the infrastructure was never built and many were left with fewer possibilities to communicate. But a mobile phone and its airtime you can buy with cash. You don't need to be banked. Almost anyone can get a mobile – and they have. The financial system was actually a barrier to progress for the world's poor, while cash was a facilitator for them.
Six billion people around the world will have a smartphone by 2020. They will have pretty much everything they need to participate in e-commerce – internet access, basically – except the financial inclusion. Which is why there will be a huge role to play in the future for new forms of digital cash – from Kenya's M-Pesa to bitcoin – money you can use even if you are not financially included.


Cash has its uses for small transactions – a chocolate bar, a newspaper, a pint of milk – which, in the UK, are still uneconomic to process by other means. It will always be the fastest and most direct form of payment there is. I like to tip waiters, for example, in cash, knowing they will receive that money, without it being siphoned off by some unscrupulous employer. I also like to shop in markets, where I can buy directly from the producer knowing they will receive the money, without middle men shaving off their percentages.
It also has its uses for private transactions, for which there are many possible reasons, and by no means all of them illegal. Small businesses starting out need the cash economy. Poor people need the cash economy. The war on cash is a war on them.
If you listen to the scaremongering, you'd start to think that all cash users are either criminals, tax evaders or terrorists. Sure, some use cash to evade tax, but it's paltry compared to the tax avoidance schemes Google and Facebook have employed. Google doesn't use cash to avoid tax. It's all done via legislative means.
Cash means total financial inclusion, a luxury the better-off take for granted. Without financial inclusion – and there will always be some who, for whatever reason, won't have it – you are trapped in poverty. So beware the war on cash.

Global majority backs a ban on 'dark net,' poll says

QuoteSeven in 10 people say the "dark net" - an anonymous online home to both criminals and activists fearful of government surveillance - should be shut down, according to a global Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.The findings, from a poll of at least 1,000 people in each of 24 countries, come as policymakers and technology companies argue over whether digital privacy should be curbed to help regulators and law enforcement more easily thwart hackers and other digital threats.The U.S. Justice Department is currently trying to force Apple Inc to write software to allow access to an iPhone used by San Bernardino, California shooter Rizwan Farook.The dark net refers to an area of the Internet only accessible via special web browsers that ensure anonymity, where content is hidden and data typically encrypted.The Ipsos poll was commissioned the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The think tank is part of a commission seeking to shape Internet governance. The question asked in the poll pointed out the dark net's anonymity can protect journalists, human rights activists, dissidents and whistleblowers, but also hide child abuse networks and illegal marketplaces selling weapons and narcotics.The portion of respondents who either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed it should be shuttered ranged between 61 percent and 85 percent, with support strongest in Indonesia, India, Egypt and Mexico and weakest in Sweden, South Korea and Kenya. Other countries polled included Pakistan, Australia, the United States, France, Germany, Turkey, and Tunisia."The public clearly wants law enforcement to have the tools to do its job. But if you flip it around and say should they have access to your data they tend to feel differently," said Fen Osler Hampson, director of the global security and politics program at CIGI.Only 38 percent of all respondents said they trust that their online activities are not monitored. Hampson said public concern about online privacy will likely grow as more and more cars, appliances and infrastructure connect to online networks.Ipsos said the poll was accurate in each country to within plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.     

Evo i samog ipsosovog izveštaja:


http://ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=7186

Startap firma koju finansira CIA razvija proizvode za negu kože koji... er... sakupljaju lične informacije???



Beauty Secrets of the Spies

Quote
SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah's lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a "formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin's most natural state."
Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.
Skincential Science's noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as "painless," is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person's biochemistry.


n-Q-Tel, founded in 1999 by then-CIA Director George Tenet, identifies cutting-edge technology to support the mission of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and provides venture funding to help grow tech firms to develop those solutions.
"Our company is an outlier for In-Q-Tel," Russ Lebovitz, the chief executive of Skincential Sciences, said during an interview with The Intercept. He conceded that the relationship might make for "an unusual and interesting story," but said, "If there's something beneath the surface, that's not part of our relationship and I'm not directly aware. They're interested here in something that can get easy access to biomarkers."

Still, Lebovitz claimed he has limited knowledge of why In-Q-Tel selected his firm.
"I can't tell you how everyone works with In-Q-Tel, but they are very interested in doing things that are pure science," Lebovitz said. The CIA fund approached his company, telling him the fund shares an interest in looking at DNA extraction using the method pioneered by Skincential Sciences, according to Lebovitz.




Beyond that, Lebovitz said he was unsure of the intent of the CIA's use of the technology, but the fund was "specifically interested in the diagnostics, detecting DNA from normal skin." He added, "There's no better identifier than DNA, and we know we can pull out DNA."
Perhaps law enforcement could use the biomarker extraction technique for crime scene identification or could conduct drug tests, Lebovitz suggested.
Carrie A. Sessine, the vice president for external affairs at In-Q-Tel, declined a media interview because "IQT does not participate in media interviews or opportunities."
(Officials at the venture capital firm have, in fact, given interviews in the past.)
Though In-Q-Tel operates in the open, it has often kept key details of its activities out of public view, beyond required annual reports. After a SecureDrop source told The Intercept about a gathering in San Jose for In-Q-Tel executives and start-up companies backed by the fund, The Intercept attempted to attend, but was denied access.
Skincential Sciences was among several presenting companies.
The shroud of secrecy around In-Q-Tel belies a 17-year effort to build ties between the CIA and the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Gilman Louie, a video game executive known for publishing best-sellers such as Tetris, Falcon, and Civilization II, was brought on as the first chief executive of In-Q-Tel. The popular mapping tool Google Earth was created around technology developed by Keyhole Corp., an In-Q-Tel-backed company that was later acquired by Google.


Still, little is publicly revealed about the use of In-Q-Tel-backed ventures and their relevance to the goals of intelligence agencies. Many of the fund's investments are not publicly revealed. The fund is reviewed by the CIA's inspector general and reports directly to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which frequently conducts business through classified briefings.
David Petraeus, while serving as the director of the CIA in 2012, remarked, "Our partnership with In-Q-Tel is essential to helping identify and deliver groundbreaking technologies with mission-critical applications to the CIA and to our partner agencies."
Despite the association with computer and satellite technology, In-Q-Tel also maintains a long-running interest in developing advanced genetic analysis, biological technologies for detection and diagnostics, as well as research into what is known as physiological intelligence, which, in a 2010 article, the fund described as "actionable information about human identity and experience that have always been of interest to the Intelligence Community."
The article, which is no longer available on the fund's website but is preserved by a cache hosted by the Internet Archive, argues that advances in medical research into biomarkers can be leveraged by intelligence agencies for a variety of uses, from airport security to next-generation identification tools.
A diagram in the article calls human skin the body's largest organ and a "unique, underutilized source for sample collection." The author, Dr. Kevin O'Connell, then a "senior solutions architect" with In-Q-Tel, notes, "The DNA contained in microorganisms in a person's gut or on a person's skin may contain sequences that indicate a particular geographical origin."


In-Q-Tel has invested in several companies working in this realm, in addition to Skincential Sciences. In 2013, In-Q-Tel publicly announced a strategic partnership with Bio-NEMS, a firm that developed a semiconductor device used to analyze DNA for a variety of diagnostic and human identification applications. Claremont BioSolutions, a diagnostics firm, and Biomatrica, a firm that specializes in preparing biological samples for DNA testing, are also backed by In-Q-Tel.
Skincential Sciences did not start out as a beauty company. The firm was founded in 2010 as DX Biosciences, which was developed around a patent by a team of scientists including Dr. Samir Mitragotri of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mitragotri has published research into the use of biomarkers as a "window to body's health."
The company gained early backing from Frontier, a venture capital company, among other investors.
While the technology has potential for a variety of medical diagnostics, including early melanoma detection, Lebovitz said the company quickly realized it had immediate value as a cosmetic. The application of the detergent developed by the firm could be used easily to diminish blemishes and dark patches on the skin. And unlike similar treatments at aesthetic spas, the technology developed by Dr. Mitragotri and his colleagues did not require acid or any discomfort.
In 2013, the firm relaunched and recapitalized as Skincential Sciences, with Clearista as its primary brand of beauty products.
Lebovitz says he intends to continue developing the technology so that it may be medically relevant, but he is also focusing on breaking into the multibillion-dollar skin care market. While Skincential has won measured success for its Clearista brand products by landing coverage on television and through social media, the company has not yet been able to compete with mainstream skin care companies.
Jamie Walsh, a blogger who runs Glam Latte, a beauty website, endorsed a Clearista product on her YouTube channel, noting that with only one application of the cream, her skin improved and was "glowing." Walsh said Skincential Sciences sent her the product for a testimonial, and noted that like many independent brands, she did not know about the company's funding.
Skincential hopes to license its product with a major distributor, or even one day become acquired by a larger beauty company. "We'll take any of those," said Lebovitz.
The chief executive noted that he is proud of the In-Q-Tel support, calling the fund "great partners."
At the gathering in February for In-Q-Tel portfolio companies, Lebovitz joined a crowd that included a number of In-Q-Tel executives, along with senior members of the intelligence community. Presenting speakers included Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, and John Maeda, design partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading Silicon Valley investment firm.
"Not only was I the odd man out," Lebovitz said, "but almost every woman at the conference wanted to come up to me to talk about skin care."
Research: Margot Williams

Evropski parlament:



Data protection reform - Parliament approves new rules fit for the digital era

QuoteNew EU data protection rules which aim to give citizens back control of their personal data and create a high, uniform level of data protection across the EU fit for the digital era was given their final approval by MEPs on Thursday. The reform also sets minimum standards on use of data for policing and judicial purposes.

Parliament's vote ends more than four years of work on a complete overhaul of EU data protection rules. The reform will replace the current data protection directive, dating back to 1995 when the internet was still in its infancy, with a general regulation designed to give citizens more control over their own private information in a digitised world of smartphones, social media, internet banking and global transfers.

"The general data protection regulation makes a high, uniform level of data protection throughout the EU a reality. This is a great success for the European Parliament and a fierce European 'yes' to strong consumer rights and competition in the digital age. Citizens will be able to decide for themselves which personal information they want to share", said Jan Philipp Albrecht (Greens, DE), who steered the legislation through Parliament.

"The regulation will also create clarity for businesses by establishing a single law across the EU. The new law creates confidence, legal certainty and fairer competition", he added.

The new rules include provisions on:

   
• a right to be forgotten,
• "clear and affirmative consent" to the processing of private data by the person concerned,
• a right to transfer your data to another service provider,
• the right to know when your data has been hacked,
• ensuring that privacy policies are explained in clear and understandable language, and
• stronger enforcement and fines up to 4% of firms' total worldwide annual turnover, as a deterrent to breaking the rules.

New rules on data transfers to ensure smoother police cooperation

The data protection package also includes a directive on data transfers for policing and judicial purposes. It will apply to data transfers across borders within the EU as well as, for the first time, setting minimum standards for data processing for policing purposes within each member state.

The new rules aim to protect individuals, whether victims, criminals or witnesses, by setting out clear rights and limitations on data transfers for the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including safeguarding against and preventing threats to public security, while at the same time facilitating smoother and more effective cooperation among law enforcement authorities.

"The main problem concerning terrorist attacks and other transnational crimes is that member states' law enforcement authorities are reluctant to exchange valuable information", said Parliament's lead MEP on the directive Marju Lauristin (S&D, ET)."By setting European standards for information exchange between law enforcement authorities, the data protection directive will become a powerful and useful tool which will help authorities transfer personal data easily and efficiently, at the same time respecting the fundamental right to privacy", she concluded.

More details on the general data protection regulation and the directive in our Q&A here.

Next steps

The regulation will enter into force 20 days after its publication in the EU Official Journal. Its provisions will be directly applicable in all member states two years after this date.

Member states will have two years to transpose the provisions of the directive into national law.

Due to UK and Ireland's special status regarding justice and home affairs legislation, the directive's provisions will only apply in these countries to a limited extent.

Denmark will be able to decide within six months after the final adoption of the directive whether it wants to implement it in its national law.
  REF. : 20160407IPR21776 Updated: ( 14-04-2016 - 16:23

 New system to identify people by their 'brainprints'

QuoteScientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications.

   Researchers at Binghamton University in US recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person - eg a slice of pizza, a boat, or the word "conundrum."

   They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy.

   "When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity," said Assistant Professor Sarah Laszlo.

   According to Laszlo, brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancellable and cannot be stolen by malicious means the way a finger or retina can.

   The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person's identity.

   "If someone's fingerprint is stolen, that person can't just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint - the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever," said Laszlo.

   "In the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorised user, the authorised user could then 'reset' their brainprint," Laszlo said.

   Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University, does not see this as the kind of system that would be mass-produced for low security applications, but it could have important security applications.

   "We tend to see the applications of this system as being more along the lines of high-security physical locations, like the Pentagon or Air Force Labs, where there aren't that many users that are authorised to enter, and those users don't need to constantly be authorising the way that a consumer might need to authorise into their phone or computer," Jin said.

   The study was published in The IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security journal.                   

Heh..

Baš ovih dana (ponovo) čitam Andersonove "Hodnike vremena", i tu se opisuje sistem identifikacije koji funkcioniše tako što osoba zamisli određenu, zadatu reč, a skener očita "unique brain response" koji ta reč izaziva.. 

In a First, Judge Throws Out Evidence Obtained from FBI Malware 

Quote
    For the first time, a judge has thrown out evidence obtained via a piece of FBI malware. The move comes from a cased affected by the FBI's seizure of a dark web child pornography site in February 2015, and the subsequent deployment of a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency's term for a hacking tool—in order to identify the site's visitors.
"Based on the foregoing analysis, the Court concludes that the NIT warrant was issued without jurisdiction and thus was void ab initio," Judge William G. Young of the District of Massachusetts writes in an order. "It follows that the resulting search was conducted as though there were no warrant at all."
"Since warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable, and the good-faith exception is inapplicable, the evidence must be excluded," it continues.

Young's order came in response to a motion to suppress from the lawyers of Alex Levin, who was arrested as part of the investigation into the child pornography site Playpen. After seizing the site, the FBI ran Playpen from a government facility from February 20 to March 4, 2015, and used a NIT to obtain over a thousand IP addresses for US-based users of the site, and at least 3000 for users abroad, according to Motherboard's investigations.
Young's move hinges around the one warrant used to authorise all of these computer intrusions. Lawyers have raised issues with it before—Colin Fieman, a defender in a related case, previously told Motherboard that it "effectively authorizes an unlimited number of searches, against unidentified targets, anywhere in the world." The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a strongly-worded amicus brief in another affected case, and called the warrant "unconstitutional."
"This is the first time a court has ever suppressed anything from a government hacking operation," Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Motherboard in an encrypted phone call. (Soghoian has been called as an expert by the defense in another affected case.)
Other judges have blocked parts of hacking operations before. In 2013, a judge denied the FBI a hacking warrant that would have authorised the agency to collect chat logs, web history and other data from the target laptop, as well as turn on the suspect's web camera.
Lawyers from other affected cases around the country are sure to be following this latest order closely.
UPDATE: Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, sent a statement.
"We are disappointed with the court's decision and are reviewing our options. The decision highlights why the government supports the clarification of the rules of procedure currently pending before the Supreme Court to ensure that criminals using sophisticated anonymizing technologies to conceal their identities while they engage in crime over the Internet are able to be identified and apprehended." 

Sve bi bilo lakše kad bi prosto objavili rat dečijoj pornografiji, kao do što su već u ratu s drogama i teroristima.

UK intel agencies spy indiscriminately on millions of innocent folks

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 24-04-2016, 07:42:47
millions of innocent folks

eh, innocent!
niko nije innocent dok to ne dokaže, i to ubedljivo!

pa još MILIONI takvih?
gde?

How Big Data Creates False Confidence

Snouden Eduard u Gardijanu:

Edward Snowden: 'Governments can reduce our dignity to that of tagged animals'

A samo ste hteli app za telefon koji će da prebroji kolko ste kilometara pretrčali u jutarnjem džogingu...


  Runkeeper is secretly tracking you around the clock and sending your data to advertisers 

Quote
FitnessKeeper, the company behind running app Runkeeper, is in hot water in Europe. The company will receive a formal complaint on Friday from the Norwegian Consumer Council for breaching European data protection laws. It turns out that Runkeeper tracks its users' location all the time – not just when the app is active – and sends that data to advertisers.


The NCC, a consumer rights watchdog, is conducting an investigation into 20 apps' terms and conditions to see if the apps do what their permissions say they do and to monitor data flows. Tinder has already been reported to the Norwegian data protection authority for similar breaches of privacy laws. The NCC's investigation into Runkeeper discovered that user location data is tracked around the clock and gets transmitted to a third party advertiser in the U.S. called Kiip.me.

The NCC's digital policy director, Finn Myrstad, told Ars Technica: "Everyone understands that Runkeeper tracks users while they exercise, but to continue after the training has ended is not okay. Not only is it a breach of privacy laws, we are also convinced that users do not want to be tracked in this way, or for information to be shared with third party advertisers. It is clear that Runkeeper needs to have a good think about how it treats user's data and privacy".
But it doesn't stop there: the investigation reportedly uncovered multiple breaches of user privacy. The NCC now wants Norway's data protection agency to take action on its claims. Unfortunately, because Runkeeper has no European subsidiaries – it's a U.S.-based company – the data protection agency has limited powers to impose sanctions on the company.
This isn't the first time we've heard about apps taking more than they should and trying to make a buck off it. It's good to know that investigations like this are being conducted, if for no other reason than that, armed with the knowledge of what an app's developers are up to, we can decide whether we want to continue supporting them or not.
Does this surprise you? Would you continue to use an app guilty of this?