A UC Berkeley professor, suspecting years of targeted computer damage against one Ph.D. student, secretly installed a hidden camera that allegedly caught another doctoral candidate sabotaging the student's laptop. The student now faces felony vandalism charges and is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15. The Mercury News reports: A UC Berkeley professor smelled a rat -- over the years there had been $46,855 in damage from computers that failed, and nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate at the college's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department.

The professor wondered if the student's luck was really that bad, or if something else was afoot. So he installed a hidden camera -- disguised in a department laptop, and pointed it at the student's computer. According to police, the sly move captured another Ph.D. candidate, 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student's computer with some implement that caused sparks to fly out of the laptop.

Now, Zou has been charged with three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10. The charges allege the damage amounted to more than $400 each time, though the professor who reported the vandalism, and the affected student, told police they suspect Zou of the additional incidents that had been going on for years, court records show.

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed written by Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022) and a visiting professor at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs: Julian Assange's lengthy detention has finally ended, but the danger that his prosecution poses to the rights of journalists remains. As is widely known, the U.S. government's pursuit of Assange under the Espionage Act threatens to criminalize common journalistic practices. Sadly, Assange's guilty plea and release from custody have done nothing to ease that threat. That Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act, a U.S. law designed to punish spies and traitors, should not be considered the normal course of business. Barack Obama's justice department never charged Assange because it couldn't distinguish what he had done from ordinary journalism. The espionage charges were filed by the justice department of Donald Trump. Joe Biden could have reverted to the Obama position and withdrawn the charges but never did.

The 18-count indictment filed under Trump accused Assange of having solicited secret U.S. government information and encouraged Chelsea Manning to provide it. Manning committed a crime when she delivered that information because she was a government employee who had pledged to safeguard confidential information on pain of punishment. But Assange's alleged solicitation of that information, and the steps he was said to have taken to ensure that it could be transferred anonymously, are common procedure for many journalists who report on national security issues. If these practices were to be criminalized, our ability to monitor government conduct would be seriously compromised. To make matters worse, someone accused under the Espionage Act is not allowed to argue to a jury that disclosures were made in the public interest. The unauthorized disclosure of secret information deemed prejudicial to national security is sufficient for conviction regardless of motive.

To justify Espionage Act charges, the Trump-era prosecutors stressed that Assange was accused of not only soliciting and receiving secret government information but also agreeing to help crack a password that would provide access to U.S. government files. That is not ordinary journalistic behavior. An Espionage Act prosecution for computer hacking is very different from a prosecution for merely soliciting and receiving secret information. Even if it would not withdraw the Trump-era charges, Biden's justice department could have limited the harm to journalistic freedom by ensuring that the alleged computer hacking was at the center of Assange's guilty plea. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. The terms for the proceeding were outlined in a 23-page "plea agreement" filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where Assange appeared by consent. Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of violating the Espionage Act, but under U.S. law, it is not enough to plead in the abstract. A suspect must concede facts that would constitute an offense. "One effect of the guilty plea is that there will be no legal challenge to the prosecution, and hence no judicial decision on whether this use of the Espionage Act violates the freedom of the media as protected by the first amendment of the U.S. constitution," notes Roth. "That means that just as prosecutors overreached in the case of Assange, they could do so again."

"[M]edia protections are not limited to journalists who are deemed responsible. Nor do we want governments to make judgments about which journalists deserve First Amendment safeguards. That would quickly compromise media freedom for all journalists."

Roth concludes: "Imperfect journalist that he was, Assange should never have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. It is unfortunate that the Biden administration didn't take available steps to mitigate that harm."

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer, was sentenced to two years in prison and a restitution of $529,000 for wiping the code repositories of his former employer in retaliation for being fired by the company. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announcement, Brody was fired on March 11, 2020, from First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco, where he worked as a cloud engineer. The court documents state that Brody's employment was terminated after he violated company policies by connecting a USB drive containing pornography to company computers.

Following his dismissal, Brody allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-valid account to access the bank's computer network and cause damages estimated to be above $220,000. "Among other things, Brody deleted the bank's code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank's code for former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names," describes the U.S. DOJ announcement. "He also emailed himself proprietary bank code that he had worked on as an employee, which was valued at over $5,000."

After the incident, Brody falsely reported to the San Francisco Police Department that the FRB-issued laptop had been stolen from his car. He continued to uphold this story when interviewed by United States Secret Service agents following his arrest in March 2021. Eventually, in April 2023, Brody pleaded guilty to lying about the laptop and to two charges concerning violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In addition to the two-year prison term and the payment of the restitution, Brody will serve three years of supervised release.

James Hunt reports via The Block: A group of FTX U.S.-based employees stumbled across a backdoor for its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research months before the crypto exchange collapsed in Nov. 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The backdoor allowed Alameda to have a negative balance of up to $65 billion using customer funds, according to previous court filings revealing code buried in FTX's systems. Negative balances were not possible for other FTX users, who would be automatically liquidated if they fell into the red.

The employees reportedly alerted their division boss to the discovery, who discussed it with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried's lieutenant Nishad Singh, but the issue was never resolved. Instead, the leader of the team who raised the concern was sacked, the WSJ said. [...] The backdoor forms a key part of the prosecution's case in Bankman-Fried's trial. Bankman-Fried faces multiple fraud charges and could serve decades in prison. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: When former Samsung executive Choi Jinseog won a contract with Taiwan's Foxconn in 2018, he tapped his former employer's supplier network to steal secrets to help his new client set up a chip factory in China, a sealed indictment by South Korean prosecutors alleges. Prosecutors announced the indictment on June 12, saying the theft caused more than $200 million in damages to Samsung Electronics, based on the estimated costs Samsung spent to develop the stolen data. The announcement did not name Choi and gave only limited details, although some media subsequently identified Choi and his links with Foxconn. The unreleased 18-page indictment, reviewed by Reuters, provides details in the case against Choi, including how he is alleged to have stolen Samsung's trade secrets and details about the planned Foxconn plant.

Choi, who has been detained in jail since late May, denied all the charges through his lawyer, Kim Pilsung. Choi's Singapore-based consultancy Jin Semiconductor won the contract with Foxconn around August 2018, according to the indictment. Within months, Choi had poached "a large number" of employees from Samsung and its affiliates and illegally obtained secret information related to building a chip factory from two contractors, prosecutors allege. Jin Semiconductor illegally used confidential information involving semiconductor cleanroom management obtained from Cho Young-sik who worked at one of the contractors, Samoo Architects & Engineers, the indictment alleges. Clean rooms are manufacturing facilities where the enclosed environment is engineered to remove dust and other particles that can damage highly sensitive chips. Samoo had participated in the 2012 construction of Samsung's chip plant in Xian, China. Prosecutors allege Choi's company also illegally obtained blueprints of Samsung's China plant from Chung Chan-yup, an employee at HanmiGlobal, which supervised its construction and floor layouts involving the chip manufacturing process. They have yet to establish how the information on floor layout was obtained, according to the indictment.

Choi signed a preliminary consulting contract in around 2018 with Foxconn to build the chip factory potentially in Xian, his lawyer said. However, Foxconn ended the contract just a year later and only paid salaries related to the project, the lawyer said. He declined to comment on why Foxconn ended the contract or to provide further details, citing the sensitivity of the matter. The person with direct knowledge of the case said prosecutors found Foxconn had agreed to provide 8 trillion won ($6 billion) to build the factory, and Foxconn also paid several million dollars to Choi's company every month until it pulled out of the contract for reasons the indictment did not disclose. Jin Semiconductor's financial statement in 2018 said it entered into an arrangement with "a major customer" for the provision of qualified manpower in the next five years. The customer paid an advance of $17,994,217 to the company, according to the statement. Choi's lawyer said his client may be a scapegoat in a campaign by the South Korean government, caught in a rivalry between China and the United States, seeking seek to slow China's progress in chip manufacturing. [...] Choi is charged along with five other former and current Jin Semiconductor employees and a Samsung contractor employee. Trial is set to begin on July 12, court records show.

Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. Decrypt reports: Ishan Wahi, 32, and his associates -- including his brother, Nikhil -- made over $1.5 million from investing in new digital assets just before they were listed by America's biggest crypto exchange. Wahi was able to use his knowledge of incoming assets to buy them and then quickly sell them, to make huge profits. When the San Francisco-based exchange lists new coins and tokens, they quickly shoot up in value, a phenomenon known as "the Coinbase effect."

The Indian national tried to flee the country after being quizzed by Coinbase, the Department of Justice said. But he was stopped from boarding a flight to India by American cops. Wahi pleaded guilty in February to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud brought against him by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Wahi, his brother and his friend, Sameer Ramani, were also hit with civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "[Wahi] violated the trust placed in him by his employer" by sharing the secret listings," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. "Today's sentence should send a strong signal to all participants in the cryptocurrency markets that the laws decidedly do apply to them."

"The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known," reports the Washington Post, "boosting lies about Ukraine's military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

"The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says." That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article. "Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning," said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1 percent claim was likely exaggerated or misleading.

The undated analysis of Russia's effectiveness at boosting propaganda on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms cites activity in late 2022 and was apparently presented to U.S. military leaders in recent months. It is part of a trove of documents circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. Air National Guard technician Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with taking and transmitting the classified papers, charges for which he faces 15 years in prison...

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.
The leaked document was apparently prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Europe Command, which directs American military activities in Europe. "It refers to signals intelligence, which includes eavesdropping, but does not cite sources for its conclusions," the Post reports, describing the document as offering "a rare candid assessment by U.S. intelligence of Russian disinformation operations."

The assessment concludes that foreign bots "view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists." And the document says a Russian center's disinformation network — working directly for Russia's presidential administration — was still working on improvements as recently as late 2022 and expected to improve its ability to "promote pro-Russian narratives abroad." After Russia's 2016 efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their attempts to verify users, including through phone numbers. Russia responded, in at least one case, by buying SIM cards in bulk, which worked until companies spotted the pattern, employees said. The Russians have now turned to front companies that can acquire less detectable phone numbers, the document says.

A separate top-secret document from the same Discord trove summarized six specific influence campaigns that were operational or planned for later this year by a new Russian organization, the Center for Special Operations in Cyberspace. The new group is mainly targeting Ukraine's regional allies, that document said. Those campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West.

"The Gaurdian reports on a document leak from Russian cyber 'security' company Vulkan," writes Slashdot reader Falconhell. From the report: Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations. Its weapons are more advanced than those of Peter the Great's era: not pikes and halberds, but hacking and disinformation tools. The software engineers behind these systems are employees of NTC Vulkan. On the surface, it looks like a run-of-the-mill cybersecurity consultancy. However, a leak of secret files from the company has exposed its work bolstering Vladimir Putin's cyberwarfare capabilities.

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan's engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet. The company's work is linked to the federal security service or FSB, the domestic spy agency; the operational and intelligence divisions of the armed forces, known as the GOU and GRU; and the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence organization.

One document links a Vulkan cyber-attack tool with the notorious hacking group Sandworm, which the US government said twice caused blackouts in Ukraine, disrupted the Olympics in South Korea and launched NotPetya, the most economically destructive malware in history. Codenamed Scan-V, it scours the internet for vulnerabilities, which are then stored for use in future cyber-attacks. Another system, known as Amezit, amounts to a blueprint for surveilling and controlling the internet in regions under Russia's command, and also enables disinformation via fake social media profiles. A third Vulkan-built system -- Crystal-2V -- is a training program for cyber-operatives in the methods required to bring down rail, air and sea infrastructure. A file explaining the software states: "The level of secrecy of processed and stored information in the product is 'Top Secret'."

Russia's security service arrested an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal on espionage charges, the first time a U.S. correspondent has been detained on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations. From a report: Evan Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information, the Federal Security Service, known by the acronym FSB, said Thursday. The service, which is the top domestic security agency and main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, alleged that Gershkovich "was acting on the U.S. orders to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday: "It is not about a suspicion, is it about the fact that he was caught red-handed." "The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich," the newspaper said. "We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family."

A former employee of a Massachusetts town is facing charges of allegedly setting up a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in a remote crawl space at a school, police said. The Associated Press reports: Nadeam Nahas, 39, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, but he did not show up and a judge issued a default warrant after rejecting a defense motion to reschedule, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney's office said. Police responded to Cohasset Middle/High School in December 2021 after the town's facilities director found electrical wires, temporary duct work, and numerous computers that seemed out of place while conducting a routine inspection of the school, Chief William Quigley of the Cohasset Police Department said in a statement Wednesday.

He contacted the town's IT director, who determined that it was a cryptocurrency mining operation unlawfully hooked up to the school's electrical system, Quigley said. The Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Department of Homeland Security assisted with safely removing and examining the equipment. Nahas, the town's assistant facilities director, was identified as a suspect after a three-month investigation. After a show-cause hearing, a criminal complaint was issued. Nahas subsequently resigned from his job with the town in early 2022, police said.

Sam Bankman-Fried instructed his FTX cofounder Gary Wang to create a "secret" backdoor to enable his trading firm Alameda to borrow $65 billion of clients' money from the exchange without their permission, the Delaware bankruptcy court was told Wednesday. Insider reports: Wang was told to create a "backdoor, a secret way for Alameda to borrow from customers on the exchange without permission," said FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich. "Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," he added. "And we know the size of that line of credit. It was $65 billion."

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) made similar allegations when it brought charges against Wang in December. But the value of that line of credit hasn't been discussed before now. The CFTC then described it as "virtually unlimited." [...] Dietderich told the court that with the $65 billion back door, Alameda "bought planes, houses, threw parties, made political donations." Dietderich said the rest of the money went towards personal loans, sponsorships, and investments. "We know that all this has left a shortfall, in value to repay customers and creditors," he added. That amount "will depend on the size of the claims pool and our recovery efforts."

ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor three journalists' physical location using their IP addresses, reports Forbes, "to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company's ongoing links to China." As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.... "It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations," TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second internal email shared with Forbes. "However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data...."

"This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People's Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected," Senator Mark Warner told Forbes....

ByteDance is not the first tech giant to use an app to monitor specific users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties.... Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journalists reporting on their apps.
Ironically, TikTok's journalist-tracking project involved the company's Chief Security and Privacy Office, according to Forbes, and targeted three Forbes journalists who had formerly worked at BuzzFeed News.

It was back in October that Forbes first reported ByteDance had discussed tracking journallists. ByteDance had immediately denied the charges on Twitter, saying "TikTok has never been used to 'target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists," and that "TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested."

Forbes also notes that in 2021, TikTok became the most visited website in the world.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod for submitting the story!

Three top Democratic campaign arms said Friday that they would set aside more than $1 million in contributions from former crypto golden boy FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, as first reported by The Washington Post. The groups plan to return the money to FTX customers as part of ongoing legal proceedings. The Verge reports: The Democratic National Committee and two top Democratic campaign groups announced the moves days after Bankman-Fried was arrested and charged with eight counts, including wire fraud and campaign finance violations. "Given the allegations around potential campaign finance violations by Bankman-Fried, we are setting aside funds in order to return the $815,000 in contributions since 2020," a DNC spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Verge on Friday. "We will return as soon as we receive proper direction in the legal proceedings."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have also pledged to set aside the $103,000 and $250,000 each received from Bankman-Fried, respectively, according to The Post. Over the last two years, Bankman-Fried became one of the most prolific political megadonors in the US, contributing more than $40 million in personal donations to mostly Democratic campaigns and organizations. But shortly after FTX went bankrupt in November, Bankman-Fried told crypto reporter Tiffany Fong that he donated a similar amount of money to Republican groups as well.

While the extent of Bankman-Fried's GOP contributions has yet to be uncovered, Democratic candidates have been pressured to return any money they received from the crypto mogul. CBS News reported Thursday that most Democratic campaigns that received publicly disclosed contributions from Bankman-Fried have pledged to either return or donate the money to charity. Newly elected Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) confirmed Wednesday that he would donate Bankman-Fried's contributions to his campaign to the Zebra Coalition, a Florida-based group servicing homeless LGBTQ+ youth. [...] Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Tina Smith (D-MN), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) all received $5,800 from Bankman-Fried since last year and have either already donated or plan to donate the funds, according to CBS News.

"A U.S. judge in Texas ruled on Friday that people killed in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes are legally considered 'crime victims,'" reports Reuters, "a designation that will determine what remedies should be imposed." In December, some crash victims' relatives said the U.S. Justice Department violated their legal rights when it struck a January 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the planemaker over two crashes that killed 346 people. The families argued the government "lied and violated their rights through a secret process" and asked U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor to rescind Boeing's immunity from criminal prosecution — which was part of the $2.5 billion agreement — and order the planemaker publicly arraigned on felony charges.

O'Connor ruled on Friday that "in sum, but for Boeing's criminal conspiracy to defraud the (Federal Aviation Administration), 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes."

Paul Cassell, a lawyer for the families, said the ruling "is a tremendous victory" and "sets the stage for a pivotal hearing, where we will present proposed remedies that will allow criminal prosecution to hold Boeing fully accountable."

Boeing did not immediately comment.

New submitter nunya_bizns writes: President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked. U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.

A former Central Intelligence Agency software engineer was convicted by a federal jury on Wednesday of causing the largest theft of classified information in the agency's history. From a report: The former C.I.A. employee, Joshua Schulte, was arrested after the 2017 disclosure by WikiLeaks of a trove of confidential documents detailing the agency's secret methods for penetrating the computer networks of foreign governments and terrorists. The verdict came two years after a previous jury failed to agree on eight of the 10 charges he faced then.

At the earlier trial, Mr. Schulte, 33, was found guilty of contempt of court and of making false statements to the F.B.I. He was convicted on Wednesday on nine counts, which included illegally gathering national defense information and illegally transmitting that information. Damian Williams, the United States attorney in Manhattan, where the trial was held, hailed the verdict. Mr. Schulte has been convicted of "one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history," Mr. Williams said in a statement.

During a 92-minute presentation Wednesday on the state of the free software movement, Richard Stallman spoke at length on a wide variety of topics, including the need for freedom-respecting package systems.

But Stallman also shared his deepest thoughts on a topic dear to the hearts of Slashdot readers: privacy and currency: I won't order from online stores, because I can't pay them . For one thing, the payment services require running non-free JavaScript... [And] to pay remotely you've got to do it by credit card, and that's tracking people, and I want to resist tracking too.... This is a really serious problem for society, that you can't order things remotely anonymously.

But GNU Taler is part of the path to fixing that. You'll be able to get a Taler token from your bank, or a whole bunch of Taler tokens, and then you'll be able to use those to pay anonymously.

Then if the store can send the thing you bought to a delivery box in your neighborhood, the store doesn't ever have to know who you are.
But there's another issue Stallman touched on earlier in his talk: There is a proposed U.S. law called KOSA which would require mandatory age-verification of users -- which means mandatory identification of users, which is likely to mean via face recognition. And it would be in every commercial software application or electronic service that connects to the internet.... [It's] supposedly for protecting children. That's one of the favorite excuses for surveillance and repression: to protect the children. Whether it would actually protect anyone is dubious, but they hope that won't actually be checked.... You can always propose a completely useless method that will repress everyone....
So instead, Stallman suggests that age verification could be handled by.... GNU Taler: Suppose there's some sort of service which charges money, or even a tiny amount of money, and is only for people over 16, or people over 18 or whatever it is. Well, you could get from your bank a Taler token that says the person using this token is over 16. This bank has verified that.... So then the site only needs to insist on a 16-or-over Taler token, and your age is verified, but the site has no idea who you are.

Unfortunately that won't help if user-identifying age-tracking systems are legislated now. The code of Taler works, but it's still being integrated with a bank so that people could actually start to use it with real businesses.
Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks on cryptocurrencies and encryption, or jump ahead to...

• Can GNU Taler accounts be frozen?
• Why cryptocurrency shouldn't replace banking
• The problem with VPN apps - and how interoperable encryption could protect your freedom

A "massive leak" by a whistleblower revealed the secret details of bank accounts linked to more than 30,000 Credit Suisse clients around the world, reports the Guardian.

They note that Credit Suisse is one of the world's largest private banks, as well as Switzerland's second-biggest lender, with 50,000 employees — and yet the leaked information "points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds," including "clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes."

The accounts are worth more than $108 billion USD (that's 100 billion Swiss Francs or £80 billion)... The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data. We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world. They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela's state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.

One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal....

This month, Credit Suisse became the first major Swiss bank in the country's history to face criminal charges — which it denies — relating to allegation it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia. However, the repercussions of the leak could be much broader than one bank, threatening a crisis for Switzerland, which retains one of the world's most secretive banking laws... Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements. That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations.

Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem. "The bank likes to say it's just rogue bankers. But how many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?" he said. Neiman alleges there has been a culture at the bank "which encourages its bankers probably from the top down to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, bury their heads in the sand on a good day, and on many days, actively assist folks to skirt whatever the law may be in order to best protect assets under management...."

The debate over whether Switzerland's banking industry has undergone sufficient reforms is likely to be renewed in light of the leak.
"Nearly 50 media organisations have spent months poring over the data," reports the BBC: But the Swiss bank rejected the allegations in a statement on Sunday, saying it strongly rejected the allegations and insinuations about the bank's alleged business practices or lack of due diligence carried out. "The matters presented are predominantly historical, in some cases dating back as far as the 1940s, and the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context", it said.... "Approximately 90% of the reviewed accounts are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015," it said, although it would not comment on specific clients mentioned....

In a statement published by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the anonymous source explained their motivation for leaking the records more than a year ago. "I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral. The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders," they wrote....

It follows other scandals for the Swiss bank, including the departure of two of its top executives after allegedly breaking Covid regulations and spying on former staff.

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two men accused of spying for China went on trial Tuesday in Warsaw -- a Chinese citizen who is a former sales director of Huawei in Poland and a Polish cybersecurity expert. The men, Weijing Wang and Piotr Durbajlo, have both pleaded not guilty. At the start of Tuesday's session in Poland's capital, a prosecutor requested that the trial be held in secret because of the classified nature of some of the evidence.

Defense lawyers objected, saying the nature of the charges requires that the proceedings be transparent. Both Wang, speaking in fluent Polish, and Durbajlo said they wanted an open trial. But after a brief recess, the three-judge panel announced the proceedings would be held behind closed doors, citing state interests, and journalists were told to leave. Wang and Durbajlo were arrested by Polish authorities in January 2019 and accused of spying for China under the cover of seeking business deals for Chinese technology company Huawei.