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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 22 declined, 18 accepted (40 total, 45.00% accepted)

Security

Submission + - NSA declassifies memo about failed TRAILBLAZER project (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reports that the NSA has just declassified one of the 5 documents NSA whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake was charged under the Espionage Act for retaining in his basement. The document, which Drake previously faced years in prison for posessing, is essentially a cheerleading memo, complimenting the Trailblazer project team for a great presentation and demo. It stands in stark contrast to numerous other reports that described the NSA IT project as an overbudget, ineffective, billion dollar seven year boondoggle."
Censorship

Submission + - Russian Wikipedia shutters in protest of Internet Blacklist plans (en.ria.ru)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "If you visit Russian Wikipedia today you will be forgiven for thinking the entire site has crashed. It is not a crash, but a protest of the Russian State Duma's Bill 89417-6 According to Ria Novosti, the bill is "proposing a unified digital blacklist of all websites containing pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas." Russian Wikipedia's main page has been replaced with a redacted logo and a protest text, part of which says "The Wikipedia community protests against censorship, dangerous to free knowledge, open to all mankind. We ask you to support us in opposing this bill" (translation by Google Translate)"

Submission + - South Korea censors it's own censor (eff.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "The EFF reports on a internet censorship case in South Korea. The blog of Professor K.S. Park was recently brought up for consideration by the Korean Communication Standards Commission, which rules over South Korea's online censorship regime at a rate of 10,000 URLs per month. The unusual thing about this case is that Park himself is a member of the commission; he was appointed to it by the opposition party as a well known free-speech advocate. The other members of the committee allowed him to make changes to his blog for now, but have vowed to "take action" against it in the future."

Submission + - LHC data continues to disagree with Supersymmetry (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports on another piece of evidence hitting the beleagured Supersymmetry community. Scientists at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India confirmed that extra levels of B-Meson decay have not been found in the LHC beauty experiment. Coming on the heels of a March report in Nature , this news seems to reinforce what many have suspected all along. Dark Matter is probably not explainable through massive shadow particles like squarks and selectrons, and for all practical purposes, the Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model of Physics is dead."
China

Submission + - EFF takes on Cisco's role in China (eff.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Several years ago, writer Du Daobin posted several essays on the internet, protesting such things as unfair taxes and the corruption of the media. He was then charged with 'inciting subversion of state power', arrested, and after many legal twists and turns, tortured in prison. Daobin, along with several other dissidents with similar stories, decided to sue Cisco Systems earlier this year under the legal theory that it aided and abetted China's violation of the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991.

As the case moves forward, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security has stepped up it's surveillance, harassment, and interrogation of Daobin and the others. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now joined the Laogai Research Foundation to draw attention to the case. As part of it's opening move, it has asked Cisco to make public statements in support of human rights, hoping that the company's influence with the Chinese government will provide some modicum of protection for the threatened dissidents."
Censorship

Submission + - The Syrian government's internet strategy (aljazeera.net)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "In a recent article on Al-Jazeera, Jillian York of the EFF speculates about the true nature of the Syrian 'hackers' who defaced AnonPlus. She references a University of Toronto analysis from May, which pointed out that the supposed independent hacktivist group the Syrian Electronic Army has a website that is hosted and registered by the Syrian Computer Society — a group that dictator Bashar Al-Asad used to run and that was founded by his brother. York has previously written about the mystery of the pro-Asad twitter floods of April, and the convenient unblocking of social media sites like youtube and Facebook earlier in the year, which allegedly allowed the Mukhabarat to spy on and entrap opposition activists through forged SSL certificates. She also points out the numerous cases of Syrian bloggers (not fakes) being censored, arrested, and persecuted for their writings online. Is the Syrian example evidence against the vision of internet-as-liberator?"

Submission + - Belarus cracks down on VKontakte (charter97.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "On several recent Wednesdays, Russian language social networking site Vkontakte has been blocked by the government of Belarus. The blocks are partly to prevent the organization of "Silent Protests", in which citizens gather in city squares, and clap in protest against president Alexander Lukashenko. The government has designated the people involved as "social network revolutionaries" and charged many with disorderly conduct. One VKontakte user, Mikhail Karatkevich, is to be put on trial August 10 for 'organizing a mass rally' after he posted a meeting notice onto his page. According to Charter 97, the regime has even set up fake proxy servers to capture the unwitting; Tor is the suggested solution."

Submission + - Government releases DoD report critical of NSA (dailykos.com) 1

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project has a summary of the newly released DoD Inspector General report (pdf) on NSA's Thinthread and Trailblazer programs. The DoD found that NSA "disregarded solutions to urgent national security needs" and that "TRAILBLAZER was poorly executed and overly expensive". NSA contractors had a "fear of management reprisal" for cooperating with the DoD audit. The FBI later raided the homes of several people involved with the report, and Thomas Drake faced Espionage Act charges for retaining information from it. Those charges were dropped two weeks ago. Radack and GAP represent Drake on whistleblower issues."
China

Submission + - 18 months in prison for making iPad 2 cases (wsj.com)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Loretta Chao of the The Wall Street Journal reports on three people in China who were sentenced to between 12 and 18 months in prison for a plot to make iPad 2 protective cases before the tablet's official release. The plan allegedly involved R&D man Lin Kecheng of Hon Hai Precision Industry Company (FoxConn) selling image data to Hou Pengna, who then passed it to Xiao Chengsong, a manager at MacTop. The charges? One "violated the privacy policy of the company", two got information through "illegal means" causing "huge losses", and they all "infringed trade secrets". The decision was handed down by the Shenzen Baoan People's Court on June 16."

Submission + - Thomas Drake innocent of all ten original charges (npr.org) 2

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "NPR, and dozens of other media sources, are reporting that NSA IT Whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake is innocent of all 10 original charges against him; including the 5 Espionage Act charges for 'retention' of 'national defense information'. Drake stared down the government to the last minute, rejecting deal after deal, because he "refused to plea bargain with the truth". The judge had even recently ruled that there was no evidence that Drake passed classified information to a reporter. In the end, he has agreed that he committed a misdemeanor: "unauthorized access to a computer". It is unknown what this means for the other non-spy Espionage cases that Obama's DOJ currently has pending (Kim, Sterling, Manning), or the Grand Jury that is currently meeting to discuss Espionage Act charges related to Wikileaks. "

Submission + - NSA trial evidence 'riddled with boxes and arrows' (fas.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "In the Espionage Act trial of NSA IT Whistleblower Thomas Drake, the main evidence against him are 5 documents he allegedly 'willfully retained' in his basement. The government, for the first time, is using the Silent Witness Rule to 'substitute' words in this evidence so that the public will not be able to see the allegedly sensitive information. The result of this 'substitution' process has been described by the defense as a tangled mess of boxes, arrows, and code words that will impossibly confuse the facts of the case. "Two weeks before trial, Mr. Drake and his counsel still do not know what evidence the jury will see""
Censorship

Submission + - DoD promotes national security through obscurity (fas.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "An SAIC analyst has written a paper calling for the 'stigmatization' of the 'unattractive' types who tend to discuss govermnent secrets in public. The plan, described in the Naval Postgraduate School Homeland Security Affairs journal, is to promote self-censorship as a 'civic duty'. Who needs to censor themselves? Amateur enthusiasts who describe satellite orbits, scientists who describe threats to the food supply, graduate students mapping the internet, the Government Accountability Office, which publishes failure reports on the TSA, the US Geologic Survey, which publishes surface water information, newspapers (the New York Times), TV shows (60 minutes), journalism websites (slate.com), anti-secrecy websites (cryptome.org), and even security author Bruce Schneier, to name a few."

Submission + - NSA CS man: My algorithm was 'twisted' by Bush (newyorker.com)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Crypto-mathematician Bill Binney worked in the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center at the NSA. There, he worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens. In a new interview with Jane Mayer, he says his program "Got twisted. . . I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. . . . my people were brought in, and they told me, 'Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They're putting pen registers on everyone in the country!'""

Submission + - First ever Pulitzer for non-print series (propublica.org)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an online news site. This year, they have been awarded the first Pulitzer for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and Bernstein's "The Wall Street Money Machine" which described how hedge funds & financiers profited from the collapse of the economy. ProPublica publishes under a Creative Commons license and hosts a Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and publish open source tools they have developed."

Submission + - Does wiretapping require cell company cooperation? (novayagazeta.ru)

Submitted by
decora
decora writes: "Recently the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, accidentally admitted to wiretapping journalist Irina Khalip. Khalip is the wife of Andrei Sannikov, one of the many opposition presidential candidates who was imprisoned after the "election" in 2010. I am wondering how Lukashenko did this? Can a government tap a modern cellphone system without the company knowing? Or would it require cooperation, like when AT&T and others helped the NSA perform warantless wiretapping on Americans? "

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