Anonymous speaks out against CISPA

another despicable piece of legislation carefully crafted by our super-rich elites to control the only free flow of information available to the masses...

anonymous...

Despite growing resistance to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA has cleared its first legislative hurdle. But the battle over the widely-criticized information-sharing bill is just heating up.

In an earlier-than-expected vote Thursday evening, the House of Representatives voted 248 to 168 in favor of the bill , which was originally designed to allow more sharing of cybersecurity threat information with government agencies.

The legislation has drawn the ire of legislators, civil liberties groups, security practitioners and professors, and hundreds of thousands of petitioners, who say the bill tramples over users' privacy rights as it allows Web firms like Google and Facebook to give private users' information to government agencies irrespective of other laws that protect users' privacy. "It's basically a privacy nightmare," says Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "CISPA would allow companies to hand over private data to the government without a warrant, without anonymity, with no judicial review."

But even before it passed, the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity "crimes," "protection of individuals the danger of death or serious bodily harm," and cases where that involve the protection of minors from exploitation.

That statute, which in effect widened the most controversial portion of the bill just hours before it came to a vote, is sure to draw even more controversy as the bill works its way through the legislative branch and reaches President Obama's desk. President Obama currently backs a bill in the Senate put forward by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, designed to increase the cybersecurity regulatory powers of the Department of Homeland security, which has been opposed by the GOP and stalled in the Senate.

The White House came out Wednesday with a strongly-worded statement slamming CISPA and pushing its regulatory approach in a threat to veto CISPA, writing that "cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive" and calling CISPA an intelligence bill rather than a security bill that treats civilians as subjects of surveillance. (White House watchers have observed, however, that the president's advisors similarly recommended that he veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which he instead signed into law.)

Regardless, reconciling the House bill in its new, even more controversial form with a Senate version, even as the White House opposes the central thrust of the legislation, will only rekindle the controversy that has grown around CISPA in the last week.

The EFF's Timm says he sees the House's early vote on CISPA as an attempt by its author, representative Mike Rogers, to squeeze the bill through before its opposition grew any stronger. "We've seen an explosion of a variety of groups and congressmen come out against the bill," he says. "As the Senate debates this, it's good that privacy and civil liberties will be front and center."

why does it have to be a constant battle to have access to information and, just possibly, the truth along with it...?

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Social media surveillance in the National Security State

i saw this article earlier today and, given how disgusted i am with most everything that's coming out of the obama administration, i have to confess, i merely shrugged, rolled my eyes and moved on... then it popped up again in another venue and i thought, well, hell, it deserves any additional visibility i might be able to give it...

FBI seeking social media monitoring tool

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a tool to mine social media for intelligence tips.

The US domestic law enforcement agency is asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would “enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing ‘open source’ actionable intelligence.”

The January 19 open request was published on a website offering federal business opportunities and was first reported by New Scientist magazine.

The FBI said it is seeking an “open source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution” for its Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC).

“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” the FBI request said.

“Intelligence analysts will often use social media to receive the first tip-off that a crisis has occurred,” it said.

The FBI said the tool “must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identity, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

It would need to be able to “instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all ‘publicly available’ tweets across the Twitter site and any other ‘publicly available’ social networking sites/forums.”

It would also need the ability to “search the data across a myriad of parameters and view terrorist activities by location, terrorist group, and type of attack and see trends and analytics.”

it's sad... five years ago, i would have been apoplectic over something like this, along with a lot of other people... now, after having gagged down serial surveillance atrocities and constitution-shredding maneuvers year after year, this is just one more in a long series...

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The free flow of information is a HUGE threat to control-obsessed governments

here's what you can find out when folks like anonymous get busy and dig it out...

The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicized on the group's AnonymousIRC Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released "1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI)."

Anonymous later said the e-mails belong to the contractor's senior vice president, Richard T. Garcia, and contained information regarding "internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen 'counter-terrorism' documents classified as 'law enforcement sensitive' and 'for official use only.'"

A key bit of information highlighted in its release pertained to Vanguard Defense Industries' ShadowHawk drones, which are used by military, law enforcement and private companies across the world and are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns.

The seven-foot ShadowHawk drones,
which are used by military, law enforcement
and private companies across the world and
are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns.

Despite highlighting the ShadowHawk unmanned aerial vehicle, the group offered no clear reason for the attack on Vanguard Defense Industries besides its association with military and law enforcement agencies.

"We are doing this not only to cause embarrassment and disruption to Vanguard Defense Industries, but to send a strong message to the hacker community. White hat sellouts, law enforcement collaborators, and military contractors beware: we're coming for your mail spools, bash history files, and confidential documents," read Anonymous' statement on the matter.

The attack on Vanguard Defense Industries is the latest in a slew of attacks on military and law enforcement agencies. Credited as a part of its "F**k FBI Friday" campaign, previous victims of Anonymous' wrath have included big name companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Monsanto.

and here's what our oh-so-concerned-with-free-speech (in OTHER countries, that is) is doing about it...

glenn...

The emergence of entities like WikiLeaks (which single-handedly jeopardizes pervasive government and corporate secrecy) and Anonymous (which has repeatedly targeted entities that seek to impede the free flow of communication and information) underscores the way in which this conflict is a genuine "war." The U.S. Government's efforts to destroy WikiLeaks and harass its supporters have been well-documented. Meanwhile, the U.S. seeks to expand its own power to launch devastating cyber attacks: there is ample evidence suggesting its involvement in the Stuxnet attacks on Iran, as well as reason to believe that some government agency was responsible for the sophisticated cyber-attack that knocked WikiLeaks off U.S. servers (attacks the U.S. Government tellingly never condemned, let alone investigated). Yet simultaneously, the DOJ and other Western law enforcement agencies have pursued Anonymous with extreme vigor. That is the definition of a war over Internet control: the government wants the unilateral power to cyber-attack and shut down those who pose a threat ot it, while destroying those who resists those efforts.

There have literally been so many efforts over the past several years to heighten surveillance powers and other means of control over the Internet that it's very difficult to chronicle them all. In August of last year, the UAE and Saudi Arabian governments triggered much outrage when they barred the use of Blackberries on the ground that they could not effectively monitor their communications (needless to say, the U.S. condemned the Saudi and UAE schemes). But a month later, the Obama administration unveilled a plan to "require all services that enable communications -- including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype" to enable "back door" government access.

This year, the Obama administration began demanding greater power to obtain Internet records without a court order. Meanwhile, the Chairwoman of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, is sponsoring a truly pernicious bill that would force Internet providers "to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year." And a whole slew of sleazy, revolving-door functionaries from the public/private consortium that is the National Security State -- epitomized by former Bush DNI and current Booz Allen executive Adm. Michael McConnell -- are expoiting fear-mongering hysteria over cyber-attacks to justify incredibly dangerous (and profitable) Internet controls. As The Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin reported in their "Top Secret America" series last year: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." That is a sprawling, out-of-control Surveillance State.

and why do you think the surveillance state is taking such an aggressive stance...? just look at where things are headed...



an article i read yesterday labeled the uk riots as an "insurrection"... i don't disagree with that assessment...

coming soon to your town...!

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Glenn: I believe that these attacks on WikiLeaks are a literal war over who controls the Internet and the purposes to which it can be used [UPDATE]

the more i read about the insane and completely unjustified vendetta being waged against wikileaks and julian assange, the more i'm inclined to agree with glenn... what we're witnessing is a concerted effort to neuter the internet, arguably the only bastion of un-"spun" information left to us peasants...

[UPDATE and BUMPED]

thanks to marcy who offers this from ian welsh...

Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

it's 9/11 time for the internet, i'm afraid...

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Mark Fiore - domestic surveillance can be just so - so SNUGGLY...!

a good follow-on to the post prior to the prior post...

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Our police state

the u.s. is jumping on the bandwagon with india, saudi arabia and the united arab emirates and - no surprise - going further, deeper and much more invasive... ya gotta love that obama...!

[O]fficials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

oh, yeah... swell...

here's what they're going to be asking for...

¶ Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.

¶ Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.

¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

paul craig roberts posted a piece a few days ago entitled "It Is Official: The US Is A Police State" in which he was lamenting the fbi raid on anti-war activists in minneapolis... it's all of a piece, i'm afraid...

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I've posted a lot on Mike McConnell but Glenn has the final takedown

my last post on mcconnell was in response to his disgustingly self-serving wapo editorial on 28 february... i find that i often have the same reaction to things as glenn greenwald who, imho, delivers the ultimate take-down of this not-very-well-disguised denizen of the corporatocracy...

[I]t isn't that people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector and back again. That implies more separation than really exists. At this point, it's more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity -- with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it's more like an intra-corporate re-assignment than it is changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI, he's simply in one division of this entity and when he's at Booz Allen, he's in another, but it's all serving the same entity (it's exactly how insurance giant Wellpoint dispatched one of its Vice Presidents to Max Baucus' office so that she could write the health care plan that the Congress eventually enacted).

In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that even McConnell, when he was nominated to be Bush's DNI, told The New York Times that his ten years of working "outside the government," for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation's intelligence functions. That's because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the Government, and therefore -- as he put it -- being at Booz Allen "has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left."

the wapo editorial was a blatant pitch focusing on three main points... one, the u.s. cyber-network is highly vulnerable to hostile attack... two, we should be very, very afraid, and three, the task of strengthening defenses against such attacks should be given to defense contractors... but glenn says it so much better than i do...

The overarching theme is all-too-familiar: we face a grave threat from Terrorists and other Very Bad People ("cyber wars"), and our only hope for protection is to vest the Government with massive new powers. Specifically, McConnell advocates a so-called "reeingeer[ing] of the Internet" to allow the Government and private corporations far greater capability to track what is being done over the Internet and who is doing it:

The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It's that simple. . . . If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce -- or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions -- chaos would result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.

Scary! And what do we need to submit to in order to avoid these calamities? This:

The United States must also translate our intent into capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options -- and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result -- more manageable.

In one sense, this is just typical fear-mongering of the type the National Security State has used for decades to beat frightened Americans into virtually full-scale submission: you are in grave danger and you can be safe only by vesting in us far greater power, which we'll operate in secret: here, allowing us to "reengineer" the Internet so we can control it.

glenn continues...

But there's something even worse going on here. McConnell doesn't merely want to empower the Government to control the Internet this way; he wants to empower private corporations to do so -- the same corporations which pay him and whose interests he has long served. He notes that this "reengineering" is already possible because "the technologies are already available from public and private sources," and explicitly calls for a merger of the NSA with private industry to create a sprawling, omnipotent network for monitoring the Internet...

[...]

In other words, not only the Government, but the private intelligence corporations which McConnell represents (and which are subjected to no oversight), will have access to virtually unfettered amounts of information and control over the Internet, and there should be "no borders" between them. And beyond the dangerous power that will vest in the public-private Surveillance State, it will also generate enormous profits for Booz Allen, the clients it serves and presumably for McConnell himself -- though The Washington Post does not bother to disclose any of that to its readers. The Post basically allowed McConnell to publish in its Op-Ed pages a blatant advertisement for the private intelligence industry while masquerading as a National Security official concerned with Keeping America Safe.

yeah, even though i did my own sound-off on this obscene op-ed piece and the incredible hubris of a guy like mcconnell, it's worth having another go at it...

my other posts on mcconnell, dating back to 2006 can be found here...

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Cybersecurity, cyberhackers, extortion, and probably a new assault on civil liberties

when you read something like "rare public warning" issued by a "CIA analyst" who knew it would be written up for public consumption, you can be DAMN sure SOMETHING is being telegraphed here... this shit isn't just tossed out there for the hell of it... we're very likely being prepped for something... any guesses...?

In a rare public warning to the power and utility industry, a CIA analyst this week said cyber attackers have hacked into the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and made demands, in at least one case causing a power outage that affected multiple cities.

"We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet," Tom Donahue, the CIA's top cybersecurity analyst, said Wednesday at a trade conference in New Orleans.

Donahue's comments were "designed to highlight to the audience the challenges posed by potential cyber intrusions," CIA spokesman George Little said. The audience was made up of 300 U.S. and international security officials from the government and from electric, water, oil and gas companies, including BP, Chevron and the Southern Co.

"We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of the attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge," Donahue said. He did not specify where or when the attacks took place, their duration or the amount of money demanded. Little said the agency would not comment further.

The remarks come as cyber attackers have made increasingly sophisticated intrusions into corporate computer systems, costing companies worldwide more than $20 billion each year, according to some estimates.

Cyber extortion is a growing threat in the United States, and attackers have radically increased their take from online gambling sites, e-commerce sites and banks, which pay the money to prevent sites from being shut down and to keep the public from knowing their sites have been penetrated, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, the cybersecurity education group that sponsored the meeting.

if this isn't prelude to yet another move to justify internet surveillance and further reduce the goddam little that's left of individual privacy, i'd be mighty surprised...

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